Towards a Parlay-grid communication model for NGN service convergence

Service creation in next generation networks (NGN) gives rise to new challenges and opportunities. One main challenge is to offer value-added services spanning heterogeneous networks. Another challenge is to find a flexible and easy way for service creation. Facing these challenges, this paper proposes a Parlay and open grid services architecture (OGSA) based NGN service convergence architecture, which not only provides a uniform access to heterogeneous network capabilities, but also builds effective distributed convergence mechanisms beyond them. Based on the architecture, we further propose a service-oriented communication model between Parlay and grid, that is, PGCOM. Setting up the connection between Parlay service and grid service, it enables NGN convergent service on grid platform to access different network resources in telecom-level through Parlay interfaces. Our effort shows that it is an interesting research direction by applying rid related technologies to telecom service creation.