Service creation in an intelligent network: concepts and framework

The operating telephone companies are being faced with the challenge of creating and rapidly introducing new network services in response to market needs. As the network evolves to meet this challenge, an infrastructure must be provided to conceptualize, develop, deploy, and maintain new services. A service creation environment is such an infrastructure. The author presents the service-creation process as a software engineering methodology and suggests a layered model for a service creation environment. This model uses the concept of very high level languages (i.e. special-purpose programming languages targeted to the telecommunications services domain) to express feature and service functionality. Programming considerations and language characteristics are also addressed