Broadband service creation and operations

Three challenges for deploying broadband services are the time-consuming process of service creation, the interoperability over heterogeneous platforms, and the gap between the needs of service management and the functionalities of network management. In this article we describe a methodology to attack the first two challenges, namely, to simplify the process of service creation and provide a platform-independent framework for service operations. A set of broadband service-independent building blocks (SIBs) are designed and used to create and customize SIB graphs for broadband services. During service running time, the service agent interprets a SIB graph and executes SIB procedures which are all downloaded from the service provider. Web, Java, and CORBA are the technological elements of this methodology. Two examples, video conferencing and video on demand, are given to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.