A CLOUD TELECOM OPEN PLATFORM FOR CONVERGING
IMS AND WEB 2.0
Lianru Liu, Haihong E
PCN&CAD Center, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xitucheng Street, Beijing, China
Xu Ke
PCN&CAD Center, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xitucheng Street, Beijing, China
Keywords: Cloud platform, IMS, Web 2.0, REST.
Abstract: Nowadays, Web 2.0 becomes more and more popular depending on interacting and collaborating with other
users in a virtual community. End users can use Web 2.0 services in All-IP network provided by sites to
create innovative services, so Web 2.0 services are an open-garden.IMS is introduced to adapt to control
based on IP in the telecom world. In order to expose the IMS capabilities, WIMS 2.0 initiative was
presented to guide telecom operators to realise the convergence between IMS and Web 2.0.Cloud
computing is focussed on open and share, and make the most use of resources including computing, store
and network bandwidth. Therefore, the cloud-based platform for converging IMS and Web 2.0 is
reasonable. This paper proposes a design of Cloud Telecom Open platform for exposition of IMS
capabilities though open APIs.
1 INTRODUCTION
Some great changes have happened dramatically in
the telecom world in recent years. According to the
long tail theory, 20% of the telecom services satisfy
80% of the customers, however the demands of
customers’ are not aligned with operator’s services.
In order to meet the demands and overcome the
limitations, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) (3GPP,
2007) is introduced to deliver Internet protocol
multimedia services. On one side, IMS builds new
value chains and business models for operators, and
on the other side enhances the end-user experience
through converged and blended services.
At the same time, a large number of social
services have appeared in the Web 2.0 (O’Reilly,
2005) world. The key point of Web 2.0 services is
that ende-user takes part in the process of design and
development. The centre of the service is becoming
the user and the Internet becomes the place where
new services are produced. In many cases, services
are not built by developers themselves, but
integrated data and functions using published APIs,
the so-called Mashup.Mashups have played an
active role in the evolution of social networks and
Web 2.0.
Moreover, there is a tendency that
communication features in the Internet services are
needed even in the mobile world.IMS and Internet
services seem to have many common features, but
they differ in some points, such as access control
and business models,etc.In a word, IMS capabilities
is not open or shared outside the mobile world, and
are a walled-garden.
To solve the problems that telecom abilities are
needed to expose to the Internet world and provide
new approaches, a new method named Telco 2.0
(The Telco 2.0 TM Initiative) was born, with the
emergence of Web 2.0. Telco 2.0 offers a new view
of seeing and thinking telecom business models.
According to Telco 2.0, WIMS 2.0 (Web 2.0 &
IMS) initiative (Lozano, 2008; Moro, 2008) is
proposed as a solution to enable the convergence
between Web 2.0 and mobile world.WIMS 2.0
defines a two-sided strategy, which allows providing
telecom capabilities to the Web 2.0 as well as
enriching the telecom services of operators’.
To achieve the convergence along with the
guidelines presented in WIMS 2.0 initiative, a
545
Liu L., E H. and Ke X..
A CLOUD TELECOM OPEN PLATFORM FOR CONVERGING IMS AND WEB 2.0.
DOI: 10.5220/0003587305450549
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (SSE-2011), pages 545-549
ISBN: 978-989-8425-53-9
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

reference model is established which is shown in
Figure 1. In the figure, the entities and relationships
among them are depicted.
Figure 1: Entities within the WIMS 2.0 reference model
(Lozano, 2008).
The philosophy of Cloud computing (Cloud
Computing) seems to centralize the resources and
provides pay-as-you-go services. In the cloud
computing world, there is a kind of service called
PaaS (Platform as a Service) which delivers a
computing platform as a service and facilitates
deployment of applications without the cost and
complexity of managing the hardware and software.
This paper is therefore aimed at creating a
platform in the style of Cloud platform which puts
telecom capabilities together and offers the abilities
to the end-users for enriching services to realise
convergence between Web 2.0 and IMS.The Cloud
Telecom Open platform concentrates on the
exposition of telecom capabilities through open Web
APIs.
2 THE CLOUD TELECOM OPEN
PLATFORM
The Cloud Telecom Open Platform (CTOP) absorbs
and draws on the Internet open mode, which has
open, integrated features, and be able to integrate
various kinds of elements both in communication
network world and Internet world in heterogeneous
environment. Telecom operators can utilize the
properties of integrating heterogeneous abilities to
create killer applications. The objective of CTOP is
to provide basis communication abilities to Internet
world and make the convergence of Internet
business services and telecom communication
business abilities come true.
In the reference model proposed in WISM 2.0
initiative, the component for exposure of IMS
capabilities is the IMS Exposure Layer, the
responsibility of this component is to expose IMS
capabilities to the outer world by open Web APIs
which mostly is REST (Representational State
Transfer) style (Fielding, 2000; Fielding and Taylor,
2000), because REST APIs are simpler and result
readable than other RPC-based methods (e.g.
SOAP).
Therefore, Cloud Telecom Open Platform must
own some functions to meet demands which are put
forward by IMS Exposure Layer, such as providing
unified and standard interfaces to expose telecom
business capabilities, connecting to Internet business
capabilities platform and telecom business
capabilities platform, controlling the authentication
and authorization of accessing to different
capabilities from various applications and so on.
The Architecture of Cloud Telecom Open
Platform is shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: The Architecture of Cloud Telecom Open
Platform.
The platform is composed by four modules:
application access control, service composition
enabler, business capabilities adapter and
app/system management.
The modules are in the form of service is on the
purpose of making the architecture loosely coupled
and achieving seamless integration and timely
update.
z Application Access Control. It works as an
entry point in the platform. The core
functionality of this service is to accept
request from various type of service
consumers. When applications need access
the platform to invoke some kinds of
telecom business capabilities through
specific access API, otherwise this module
is also in charge of authentication and
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authorization functions to assure that
invokes are legal.Finally, application access
control also protect data security by means
of encryption to protect the user/business
data secure, and ensure that critical data and
privacy data are not lost.
z Service Composition Enabler. Com-
position of services is a tough task because
of the different objectives and lack of
inherent organizational arrangements or
behaviour regulations. Composition enabler
supports the automated service composition
to facilitate user's requirement by taking a
sound understanding of user's request and a
global view of all the available services.
First, different service APIs are parsed and
analyzed to encapsulate to unified form, and
then according to the demand finish the
composition of services.
z Business Capabilities Adapter. This
module is the key point to implement
transformation between telecom capabilities
and Internet services. In this module, there
is a business integration engine to
accomplish the adaptation of various types
of business capabilities. For example, SMS
component implements the protocol
conversions from WIMS SMS API to SMS
gateway, and MMS component achieves the
protocol convention from WIMS MMS API
to MMS gateway. Business capabilities
adapter is responsible for accessing to
different business platforms, collecting
different business capabilities including
Internet business capabilities and telecom
business capabilities in the meantime.
z App/system Management. management
module is indispensable for any kind of
platform, so this platform consist of a
couple of components to make the platform
manageable.SLA management component
implements controls to ensure user-
contracted QoS and SLA offered by service
provider. Billing component ensures the
connections with OCS/CCF system and
generates the required billing information
which will be uploaded to the OCS/CCF
system. Routing processing component
enables to achieve routing mechanism
among network – side business enablers.
Configuration management is in charge of
connection between Web service interfaces
and business management system, and
realising the configurations of business
capabilities, applications, users and business
providers. Log component is responsible for
collecting system logs and finishing unified
management for logs.
The Cloud Telecom Open Platform achieves the
concentration of different telecom business
capabilities and exposition of these capabilities.
3 THE BUSINESS PROCESS FOR
CTOP
As the architecture of Cloud Telecom Open Platform
mentioned above, the business processes of CTOP
are also very important to operate the platform.
As we all know, the business process does not
exist indepently, and each one is corresponding to
different roles, so before introducing the processes,
roles need be divided for platform at first.
There are three main roles taking part in the
platform, which are developer, application and end-
user. Developers are persons who will use open
APIs to create new services to enrich service world.
Applications are legal APIs’ invokers which are
developed by developers and run in some sites or
platforms. End-users are service consumers who use
those applications mentioned above.
The Cloud Telecom Open Platform consists of
four kinds of business processes, which are
authentication process, authorization process,
registration process and capabilities invoke process.
z Authorization Process: open APIs
provided by CTOP must be used after
authorization process. According to three
kinds of roles; authorization can check the
request from these roles and decide the
request whether legal.
z Authentication Process: because open
APIs are exposed to Internet, CTOP has
some verification approaches to meet
demands. Basic HTTP verification, token-
based verification and Oauth verification
are contained in the verification process.
z Registration Process: when CTOP
communicates with IMS core network, the
user’s authentication credentials IMS must
first be obtained, in lieu of the user through
the IMS authentication.
z Capabilities Invoke Process: through open
APIs CTOP invokes 2G/3G basic
communication capabilities. This process is
core for CTOP and plays an important role
in CTOP.
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547

The sequence chart for capabilities invoke
process is shown in figure 3.
End-user Application CTOP
Telecom
network
1.use application
2.open API invoke
3.authentication
and authorization
4.capabilities
invoke
5.return result
6.return result
7.return result
Figure 3: The sequence chart for capabilities invoke
process.
Process description:
1. End-user runs applications;
2. CTOP application invokes open API,
carrying the parameter information such as
USER_ID, APP_ID;
3. The platform authenticates the request
with relevant parameters;
4. The platform achieves the telecom
capabilities invoke through protocol conversion;
5. The operator’s network returns the invoke
result;
6. The platform returns results back to CTOP
applications;
7. The invoke result is sent to the end-user.
In a word, the business process is not exclusive,
and these processes are introduced according to
different situations faced by operators. These
processes not only ensure the service open, but also
support the sustainable development of the
implementation technology, which is meaningful.
4 THE OPEN API FOR CTOP
The Cloud Telecom Open Platform provides a set of
open APIs which are in a consistent habit of Internet
developers, and do not care much about program
language and operating system. Developers can
choose the language which they are familiar with
and achieve basic communication capabilities.
Figure 4 depicts the interfaces offered by CTOP,
which contain eight kinds.
 Web 2.0 application: RESTful API and
SOAP-based API are used to connect all kinds of
applications with CTOP.
z OCS/CCF: CTOP communicates with
OCF/CCF following the Diameter protocol.
z Business management system: interface
between CTOP and business management
system is in a style of web service.
z WAP Gateway: interface following PAP
protocol.
z SMS Gateway: SMPP protocol is used in
this interface.
z MMS Gateway: MM7 protocol is utilized to
connect CTOP with MMS Gateway.
z LBS Gateway: MLP protocol is applied to
link CTOP with LBS Gateway.
z CSCF: CTOP connects CSCF using SIP
protocol and gains instant message, state
presence from IMS domain.
Taking the operation requirement of the open
API into consideration, here, we propose a set of the
open API for exposing telecom capabilities to
Internet world and realise convergence between
Web 2.0 and Telecom domain.
Figure 4: The open API of CTOP.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Open and sharing are tendency of Internet and
telecom services. Telecom capabilities world is
walled-garden for a long time.WIMS 2.0 initiative
proposes a thinking pattern to overcome those
limitations and try to handle the problem for
converging Web 2.0 and IMS.This paper presents a
telecom open platform based on cloud concept,
whose architecture, business process and open APIs
are all described in detail, according to a reference
model mentioned in WIMS 2.0 initiative. The Cloud
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548

Telecom Open Platform has two-side functions, one
is to collect different telecom capabilities hosted in
different platforms, and the other is to offer these
capabilities to the outer world through fine-defined
open APIs.The aim of CTOP is to construct a base
platform to achieve convergence and business model
change and helps the users to become the centre of
the services.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is financially supported by the National
Key project of Scientific and Technical Supporting
Programs of China (Grant, Nos.2009BAH39B03,
2008BAH24B04,2008BAH21B03,2006BAH02A03)
; the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(Grant No.61072060); the Program for New Century
Excellent Talents in University (No.NECET-08-
0738); the Program of the Co-Construction with
Beijing Municipal Commission of Education of
China.
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