IP-based, value-added services have great potential to create value for consumers and generate additional revenue streams for service providers. Telcordia's adaptive communicating applications platform (ACAP) is a system designed to provide a uniform and integrated service development platform for developing and deploying value-added services. The OSGi/spl reg/ alliance is an industry wide consortium that defined a standard platform that provides lifecycle management services for value-added services. Great synergy exists between ACAP and the OSGi service platform, as ACAP provides support for the service management issues not addressed by OSGi technology, and vice versa. In this paper, we argue for integration of ACAP and the OSGi service platform in order to provide better overall service management. We present a lightweight, cost-effective integration approach.

We present a model-driven approach to rapid service introduction, in which the need for writing and integrating custom integration code in existing operations systems is replaced by interface mapping between service components and management components of operations systems. In particular, services are represented as dependency models, from which mappings to management interfaces of individual OSS components can be derived. Through strategic use of XML, XSLT, and related technologies, our approach is applicable to a wide variety of services and operations systems. A working prototype system has been developed, which includes a custom modeling tool and OSS environment. By separately developing and deploying VoIP and push-to-talk (PTT) services in the prototype, we have successfully demonstrated viability of our approach.

The need of a data stream management system (DSMS), with the capability of querying continuous data streams, has been well understood by the database research community. We provide an overview on a DSMS prototype called T2. T2 inherits some of the concepts of an early prototype, Tribeca [M. Sullivan et al. (1998)], developed also at Telcordia, but with complete new design and implementation in Java with an SQL-like query language. Our goal is to build a framework that provides a programming infrastructure as well as useful operators to support stream processing in different applications. We set our first targeted application to healthcare biosensor networks, where we applied T2 to monitoring and analyzing electrocardiogram (ECG) data streams, arriving via wireless networks from mobile subjects wearing ECG sensors. Monitoring remote patients via wireless sensors not only provides convenience and safety assurance to the patients, but also saves health care cost in many aspects.

Web services are rapidly becoming the technology of choice for integrating distributed application components in heterogeneous computing environments. In this paper, we present a novel e-commerce prototype application that itself would not be feasible without the leverage provided by underlying Web services technologies for flexible design and rapid prototyping. The application is a model-driven service brokerage that allows service providers to model, advertise, validate, and create a wide range of services (e.g. Internet access services such as DSL, cable, video-on-demand, etc) in an open marketplace in an automated fashion. The application answers real needs expressed by today's large service providers and goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in online communication marketplaces. It consists of several functional components, i.e. a service dependency modeling tool, brokerage engine, location services, and workflow engine - that have been independently developed on diverse platforms, e.g., J2EE, .NET. To efficiently integrate these components, we have designed a distributed Web services architecture, in which one Web service functions as a "hub" between previously disconnected components, another works as a "wrapper" of legacy data systems, while another "orchestrates" invocations of these services. Use of Web services has enabled parallel and independent development and testing, greatly increasing productivity and reducing time to get the system operational. It has also fostered the development of new brokerage features, which would have been difficult to plan without first experimenting with a "live" system.

UCS-Router (E. Bertino et al.) is a policy engine developed for message dispatching in a Universal Communication System. A user of the system has a unique identifier, named Universal Communication Identifier (UCI), independent from the actual communication devices the user owns. It is a task of the UCS-Router to properly route messages or phone calls arriving at the UCI to the proper user devices. The routing process is performed according to policies the user specifies on the type of message, on the device capabilities and states, on the sender characteristics, and on the message sending time. We present a declarative policy language developed for UCS-Router. Users of UCS-Router can use this language for specifying message filtering and routing policies. Moreover, we present issues that can arise in the evaluation process of the policies. Such issues are primarily due to the high expressiveness of the language and to the possibility to handle a great variety of message media format. Finally, we present how the UCS-Router addresses such issues.

Three important trends in telecommunications have received media attention for their potentially wide-ranging impacts. The first is increasing competition among telephone service providers, spurred in the United States by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The second is the technological convergence between telephony and the Internet. The third is the ever-increasing number of mobile devices and users. In this paper we explore the effects of these trends on telecommunication network databases.

We study client-server data caching, both with and without expiration timestamps, to assess its applicability to present and future telecommunications services such as local number portability, toll-free numbers, and mobile telephony. We perform simulation studies to evaluate the empirical performance of a variety of strategies for caching in a client-server setting. Data caching at client locations is found to be an economical and scalable approach to support future data-intensive telecommunications services.

We report on a network traffic warehousing project at Telcordia. The warehouse supports a variety of applications that require access to Internet traffic data. The applications include Service Level Agreement (SLA), web traffic analysis, network capacity engineering and planning, and billing. We describe the design of the warehouse and the issues encountered in building the warehouse.

Data Warehousing for INventory management (DWIN) is a production project at Telcordia aimed at providing telecommunications service providers with decision support functions for inventory control and monitoring. In this paper, we report some interesting issues related to the design of the data warehouse. Specifically, we will discuss the issues of slow-evolving fact, transaction-oriented fact table, and large dimensions. We also propose the concept of virtual data cubes and show its usefulness. We address these issues through a data mart case study and present benchmarking results. Finally, based on the experiences learned, we discuss potential research issues that may benefit the data warehousing and OLAP practice.

We measure the performance of several cooperative caching policies for a database with hot spots. The workload consists of queries and append-only update transactions, and is modeled after a financial database of stock (historical) trading information. We show that cooperative caching is effective for this application. We show that selecting the correct set of peer servers when servicing a cache miss is crucial to achieving high performance, and we demonstrate a greedy algorithm that performs close to optimal for this workload. We also evaluate several cache replacement policies and show that a 2nd-chance algorithm performs best. In a 2nd-chance algorithm, replaced pages are transferred to a peer server rather than being discarded. When a page is selected for replacement a 2nd time, the page is discarded. Our results can be applied in the design of proxy servers for databases or Web servers where a layer of proxy servers are used to scale the system performance.