Douglas William Varney

Delivering seamless services in open networks using intelligent service mediation

In this era of converged networks, service providers are seeking ways to seamlessly provide a wide spectrum of services and applications that will differentiate them from their competitors and add to their revenue streams. At the same time, new industry initiatives are pushing toward open networks, in which third-party application providers can use application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Parlay, Open Services Architecture (OSA), and Java∗ APIs for Integrated Networks (JAIN∗) to access network services. One challenge for network operators is to attract and engage third-party application providers while protecting the network from harm. We propose using intelligent service mediation to enable operators to open their networks safely through policy management techniques and to reduce the complexity involved in delivering applications developed by third parties over public switched and mobile networks. We also describe an implementation of intelligent service mediation.

Enhanced services in wap-enabled networks

In todays highly competitive wireless marketplace, carriers have to offer user-friendly, innovative services to gain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, subscribers demand services that can be easily customized to their specific needs. The advent of the wireless application protocol (WAP) and WAP-enabled mobile phones is providing an opportunity for carriers to leverage this technology to enrich their service offerings. WAP is becoming the de facto standard for mobile subscribers who want to browse the contents in the Internet and perform e-commerce transactions. At the same time, new capabilities — such as those provided by intelligent network (IN) technology — are also being introduced into the public land mobile networks (PLMNs) to provide enhanced services. This paper discusses how the emerging WAP technology can be synergistically combined with PLMN capabilities to provide mobile subscribers with enhanced converged voice/data services in WAP-enabled wireless networks. To illustrate these concepts, this paper includes several service examples.