Motivation

With the rapid growth of IP services, including IP multimedia telephony and IPTV, demand has been continuously increasing to enhance the network capabilities of multi-service networks. These emerging services and evolution of existing ones, and their variety of deployment scenarios, are placing more and more requirements on networks and are resulting in the need to provide new service and network capabilities. Response to this demand is calling for the creation of an open environment whereby also third parties can develop services and capabilities. In particular, there is now significant support for the NGN to evolve consistently with the concepts of the service oriented architecture (SOA) framework, thereby allowing the composition of interoperable and independent building blocks from both Information technology and telecom domains and enabling the integration of rich content, data applications and business processes of the IT domain with intelligent, real-time network capabilities of the telecom domain. Such an approach will allow for flexible and agile service creation, operation and management, will drive development of capabilities which are portable and reusable across networks, and will allow applications (developed by service and network providers as well as third parties) to operate via standardized interfaces (such as Web Services oriented APIs).

In the context of a SOA enabled next generation multi-service network environment, study is required, on the basis of business cases and service requirements, to develop implementation scenarios for emerging services as well as to specify the related service and network architectures, including service middleware aspects. These studies, in the context of an open service environment, will allow the specification of the requirements and capabilities imposed on networks (including user networks) by these services, with the goal of maximizing usage of common service and network capabilities and functional building blocks.

Key requirements to be considered are ubiquitous support of: seamless end-to-end service operations, service access by mobile and wireline users, wireless/wireline technology independent service access, real time multimedia content delivery, unicast and multicast delivery technologies, SLAs and differentiated levels of quality of service, enhanced security, service mobility, service interworking, policy based capabilities, context based capabilities, user identification, authentication and authorization, service discovery, service routing, service brokering, service composition, and both IPv4 and IPv6 protocol technologies.

Emerging services include IP multimedia telephony applications, IPTV applications, content delivery services, business/enterprise communications, ubiquitous sensor network based applications, identification based services, context aware services, third party services such as managed delivery services and others, applications of user networks (home networks), applications of grids and related enablers, VPNs and other network virtualization applications, managed peer to peer services, advanced data communication services, as well as other future applications and services based on composition of open service environment capabilities.

Recommendations under responsibility of this Question include:

Y.1261, Y.1281, Y.1310, Y.1311, Y.1311.1, Y.1312, Y.1313, Y.1314, Y.1315, Y.2201, Y.2211, Y.2212, Y.2213, Y.2233, Y.2234

Question

Study will consider emerging services in next generation multi-service network environments.

Study items to be considered include, but are not limited to:

• What activities are needed for the development of implementation scenarios of emerging services in evolving next generation network environments, including study of related capabilities, mechanisms and technology enhancements to support the specified requirements?
• What activities are needed for the development of service and network architectures, including middleware aspects, of emerging services in evolving next generation multi-service network environments, with the goal of maximizing usage of common service and network capabilities and functional building blocks across different services and related business cases? Service and network architectures should support an open service environment, and be consistent with a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach.
• What activities are needed to support an open service environment and a SOA approach in evolving next generation multi-service network environments?
• What Recommendations should be developed to identify requirements placed on networks (including user networks) by emerging services in evolving next generation multi-service network environments? Requirements for enhanced capabilities impacting transport networks (based on IP/ (G) MPLS, carrier Ethernet or other technologies) are included.
• What enhancements to existing Recommendations are required to provide energy savings directly or indirectly in information and communication technologies (ICTs) or in other industries? What enhancements to developing or new Recommendations are required to provide such energy savings

Tasks

Tasks include, but are not limited to:

• Development of Recommendations on emerging services in evolving next generation multi service network environments (requirements and capabilities, service and network architectures, implementation scenarios).
• Development of Recommendations on open service environment and SOA in evolving next generation multi-service network environments (including requirements for telecom SOA and telecom APIs, and capabilities and components of a SOA enabled open service environment).
• Completion of draft Recommendations currently under way.
• Revision of Y.2233
• Maintenance and enhancement of the Recommendations for which the Question is responsible.
• Coordination with the NGN related Questions (in particular in the areas of NGN services and architectures).
• Coordination with standardization bodies, fora and consortia involved in standardization of SOA and application to network interface related aspects.

Relationships

Recommendations: Y-series

Questions: All NGN related Questions

Study groups: All NGN related study groups

Standardization bodies, fora and consortia:

• ATIS (NGN)
• ECMA (Business Communications)
• ETSI (TISPAN)
• IETF (VPN, Multicast)
• ISO/IEC JTC1 (USN)
• OASIS (SOA, Web Services)
• OMA (OSE, Enablers)
• TMForum (SDF)
• W3C (SOA, Web Services)
• 3GPP and 3GPP2 (Common IMS, OSA, Multimedia Telephony)