A Flexible Platform for Provisioning Telco Services in Web 2.0 Environments

Web 2.0 has been an integral part of modern societies, providing collaboration functionalities between individuals. Innovative and pervasive nature of Web 2.0 services has led telecom operators to a strong competition with internet content providers as over-the-top applications are getting very popular. Services can be created faster in the Web 2.0 world where anyone can develop. It is in contrast with the legacy telecom infrastructure where services are tightly coupled with the underlying access networks. Recently, telecom operators have been rolling out the IMS, which provides an environment for rapid application development of services. However, applications created on top of the IMS are based on SIP, which is not popular in the Web 2.0 domain. This paper proposes a flexible platform for provisioning telecom services that is independent of the underlying communications protocol being deployed. A proof-of-concept implementation that is developed based on the Parlay X specification for telecom service capabilities and information exposures on top of an IMS network is presented, and a brief overview of the performance is given.