-- Context and motivation
The Internet revolution has changed traditional business and forced it to reinvent itself. Operator services are losing their appeal due to the emergence of new communication services, like chat and social networks, which replace, not just complement traditional voice telephony. The service environment has moved on to the web, with operators providing only access and transport. The requirements of web applications to launch interactive communication are gaining momentum, fuelled by technologies that enable browsers to convey interactive sessions.
Operators need an evolution path to match the requirements depicted by Industry 4.0 and Smart City. Currently they provide a limited set of services that are tightly associated with their own network's capabilities, within their geographical reach, or through roaming agreements. These services are regulated, in contrast to Internet applications, which are global and unlicensed. To compete, operators need to gain the agility of the Internet world, and adopt Internet style tools and technologies, while exploiting their assets: trust, network management, real-time systems, and quality-of-service management.
The major structural difference between the operators approach and the web is related to a recurring concept in the deployment of ICT solutions: full de-perimeterisation of services. However, technology progress (4G, 5G) has decoupled access-control from the service, opening the door for web-based voice/video services, via any access type and on any device. This enables operators to enter the market of web-based communications. They can take the role of a ‘Communication Service Providers’ for web calling services. They can also be ‘Network Service Providers’, for delivering the media as a wholesale activity, offerring enhanced web routing with assured quality. Finally they can act as trusted identity providers, offering services that foster intra-domain mobility.
-- Challenge
The project designed and prototyped a non-telecom centric, but Web-centric, P2P service architecture, enabling dynamic and interoperable trusted relationships among distributed services called “Hyperties” (Hyperlinked Entities). Hyperties support use-cases such as contextual and social communications, M2M/IoT, and content oriented services.
Today, browser based technologies enable real-time interaction, and improved media streaming over the Internet, but there are no standards for managing the signalling that establishes sessions between calling parties. The challenge is to provide tools that enable discovery and authentication of the communication parties, allowing for diverse scenarios and services, retaining global compatibility, without creating new closed communication audiences (‘silo’) or proprietary systems.
-- Solution
The framework is based on specialized P2P and Cloud services, delivered as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. It supports communication services that rely on a mesh of ‘live’ Hyperties at the endpoints that create a ‘virtual’ network within the Internet, while the media is routed through gateways that support policy enforcement for quality and security over the Internet.
The project delivers an architecture that allows operators and service providers to offer de-perimetrised services and compete with web companies. The architecture provides extensible APIs for service developers based on secure, certified and portable independent identities.
The solution will be demonstrated through an open source prototype that supports its mid-term commercial deployment, and its suitability for the relevant use-cases.
