The FRIENDS platform - A software platform for advanced services and applications

July–September 2000 59 Copyright 2000. Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction New high-speed networks make possible new telecommunication services and applications involving voice, data, and multimedia. These networks open new opportunities to service providers such as operators, Internet service providers (ISPs), and application service providers (ASPs), especially if they can rapidly deploy many compatible services that not only match the expectations of their customers, but are also easy to integrate and manage. This paper describes the FRIENDS service platform, which can be used by service providers to offer a variety of services. FRIENDS1 (FRamework for Integrated Engineering and Deployment of Services) is a joint project of Lucent Technologies, KPN Research, Telematica Instituut, TNO (the Dutch National Organization for Applied Scientific Research), and the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) of the University of Twente. The goal of the project is to develop a software platform that provides an integrated solution to the problems of creating, deploying, and using services for next-generation networks. The FRIENDS platform solves the problems of today’s service providers and their customers, and has the potential to open new markets for the service providers of tomorrow. It has a broad range of applications, and is adaptable to a changing business environment. This flexibility is a major benefit in the dynamic world of telecommunications. This paper is organized as follows. The section immediately below provides background information on the FRIENDS business model. The section following it describes the problem of integrating service deployment, development, and use. The next section describes the FRIENDS platform architecture in detail. Two subsequent sections present applications of our approach. The first describes how the FRIENDS platform can support an advanced collaborative application. The second concerns the application of our approach to next-generation packet and converged networks. The final section provides a summary of the paper and indicates promising directions for future work. ♦ The FRIENDS Platform—A Software Platform for Advanced Services and Applications Hendrik B. Meeuwissen, Harold J. Batteram, and John-Luc Bakker