A prototype and demonstrator of Akogrimo's architecture: An approach of merging grids, SOA, and the mobile Internet

The trend of merging telecommunication infrastructures with traditional Information Technology (IT) infrastructures is ongoing and important for commercial service providers. The driver behind this development is, on one hand, the strong need for enhanced services and from the other hand, the need of telecommunication operators aiming at value-added service provisioning to a wide variety of customers. Furthermore, this is driven due to the fact that existing value chains in the telecommunications infrastructure are disappearing, while the IT sector could bring added value to the telecommunications network. The last step is highly demanded in order to increase the willingness to pay for new services. Such an increased willingness to pay can justify huge investments to be made by operators within their infrastructures. In the telecommunications sector, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising service platform, which may become a “standard” for supporting added-value services on top of the next generation network infrastructure. Since its range of applicability is bound to SIPenabled services, IMS extensions are being proposed by “SIPifying” applications. In parallel to these developments within the traditional IT sector, the notion of Virtual Organizations (VO) enabling collaborative businesses across organizational boundaries is addressed in the framework of Web Services (WS) standards implementing a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Here, concepts for controlled resource and service sharing based on WS and Semantic Technologies are deployed. Since the telecommunications sector has become, in the meantime “mobile”, all concepts brought into this infrastructure must cope with the dynamics that mobility brings in. Therefore, within the Akogrimo project the VO concept has been extended toward Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organizations (MDVO), considering additionally key requirements of mobile users and resources. Different scenarios for MDVOs show a clear demand on integrating multimedia applications, in particular conversational service. This work here describes major results of the Akogrimo project, paying special attention to the overall Akogrimo architecture, the prototype implemented, and the key scenario in which the instantiated Akogrimo architecture shows a very clear picture of applicability, use, and an additional functional evaluation.