Design and analysis of the composed telecom services

Abstract

Telecommunication (TelCo) is a key applicative area where adopting the web service paradigm has an enormous potential to facilitate the development process of powerful, complex functionalities on top of existing ones. At the same time, the specific features of TelCo applications pose difficult challenges to the adoption of standard languages and tools for web services. For instance, they need to cope with asynchronous communications, driven by heterogeneous events, and to handle concurrent, long-running transactions, involving the interaction of dynamically evolving sets of partners. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, based on our analysis of current TelCo standards, and referring to a real-life case study, we identify and discuss a restricted set of orchestration patterns, and show how these can be modeled using the de-facto standard language for web services, ws-bpel. Then, we confront with the crucial issue of guaranteeing the correctness of such models, providing an automated support for the formal verification of their behavior, based on specific and advanced model-checking techniques. Our tests on the reference scenario witness the effectiveness of the approach, and identify its limits. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.