Abstract
The move toward market deregulation and open competition has
sparked a wave of serious introspection in the
telecommunications service industry. Telecom providers and
operators are now required to open up their primary revenue
channels to competing industries. The competition for product
differentiation increasingly depends on the level of
sophistication, degree of flexibility, and speed of deployment
of services that a future provider can offer. These factors in
turn depend heavily on the flexibility of the software
architecture in place in a provider's operational
infrastructure. Within this context, we examine the service
architecture of two major global communication networks-the
telephone network and the Internet and explore their
weaknesses and strengths. We discuss the realization of an
open programmable networking environment based on a new
service architecture for advanced telecommunication services
that overcomes the limitations of the existing networks. Our
approach to network programmability stems from two angles-one
conceptual, the other implementational. In the first, we
attempt to develop a service model that is open and reflects
the economic market structure of the future telecommunications
service industry. Furthermore, we introduce an extended
reference model for realizing the service marketplace and
present it as a vehicle for creating multimedia services with
QoS guarantees. In the second, we investigate the
feasibility of engineering the reference model from an
implementation standpoint. We describe a realization of the
open programmable networking environment as a broadband
kernel. Called xbind, the broadband kernel incorporates IP
and CORBA technologies for signaling, management, and
service creation, and ATM for transport. We also address
some of the important QoS, performance, scalability, and
implementation issues
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