Service Provision Technologies for Next Generation Communications

This book provides the first overview of the service technologies available to telecoms operators working in a post-convergence world. Previous books have focused either on computer networks or on telecoms networks. This is the first to bring the two together and provide a single reference source for information that is currently only to be found in disparate journals, tool specifications and standards documents. In order to provide such broad coverage of the topic in a structured and logical fashion, the book is divided into 3 parts. The first part looks at the underlying network support for services and aims to explain the technology that makes the user-visible services possible. This section covers multimedia networking, both traditional (legacy) and future (softswitch) call processing, intelligent networks, the Internet, and Wireless networks. Part 2 deals with how these services may be analysed and managed. Chapters cover topics such as commercial issues, service management, quality of service, security, standards and APIs. Part 3 concludes the book by looking ahead at evolving technologies and more speculative possibilities, discussing the kinds of services that may be possible in the future and the technologies that will support them. Focuses is on how the technology supports the services, rather than on technology for its own sake Contributors drawn from both academia and industry (companies such as Marconi, BT, Telcordia, Cisco, Analysys) to give both theoretical and real-world perspectives Unique singe-reference source for a wide range of material currently found only in disparate papers, specs and documentation Covers brand new technologies such as JAIN, JTAPI, Parlay, IP, multimedia networking, active networks, WAP, wireless LANs, agent-based services, etc.