Web service based asynchronous service execution environment

Abstract

In the design and implementation of today's and tomorrow's telecommunication platforms, a special attention is given to enable rapid application development for both the service provider and the end-user by providing very advanced and sophisticated Service Creation Environments (SCEs). Many of such development tools are designed as GUI-based and allow to compose high level services by connecting blocks representing the basic functionalities. By hiding most of the technical information from the user, requirements to the platform increase, to cope with such abstract representation and provide more sophisticated functionalities in the service execution and administration environment. The integration of functionalities belonging to telecommunication and Internet models and the adoption of a more intuitive event-driven composition and execution model raise a number of issues which must be solved to provide a solid execution platform. This paper describes how a majority of these issues have been tackled in the development of the Service Execution Environment (SEE) for the OPUCE platform. Section 1 will introduce the concept of OPUCE Services by describing the composition model adopted in the Service Creation Environment. Section 2 will describe the Service Execution Environment architecture, explaining how it can support the execution of OPUCE Services as previously defined. Section 3, will explain the reasons behind the choices of web service and BPEL technologies to implement the SEE. Section 4 will describe the specification and the actual implementation of the Service Logic Engine. In Section 5 conclusions are drawn and an outlook on future work is provided. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.