IMS Application Development
Blended services primarily combine aspects of Internet based Presence and IP Multimedia Subsystem- (IMS)-based telephony services and, in particular, focuses on services that blend Presence features and telephone call-handling functions such as Presence Based Call Forwarding, Presence based Call State etc.
The underlying infrastructure for these services depends on the successful deployment of IP-Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) architectures with the flexibility offered by a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) and its key Service Broker (SB) function.
With the Service Broker, a minimal set of applications can be configured in a multiplicity of ways as its elements are brought into play in mix and match arrangements. For the degree of flexibility needed for the service broker to support unique service combinations, the service broker must be programmable.
This architecture trial introduces a lightweight, programmable, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-centric service broker architecture and the concept of the Blended Services, which is central to this architecture. The service is developed to understand the flexibility of the proposed architecture and to be able to estimate the effort for future service developments.
Since SDP/Service Broker uses standard protocols and runs independent of the Application Servers, vendor lock-in is avoided. To highlight this, this application trial uses Application Servers from two different vendors, namely Oracle providing the Presence Functionality and Sonus providing the Telephony features.
To fulfil the creation and deployment of blended services, the following components are used during the trial:
- Oracle OCCAS (Oracle Communication Convergence Application Server) acting as a Service broker.
- Oracle OCP (Oracle Communications Presence) acting as the Presence Server.
- Sonus ASX Class 5 feature Server providing standard telephony features.
- SIP Soft Phones for providing user accessibility to the Blended Services.