FEATURE PROVISIONING AND MONITORING IN COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS

摘要

A service delivery infrastructure is provided for use with a communications network to provide selected sets of services to different customers of the network. Each customer of the network effectively sees a dedicated service network for their private use. The sets of services available to any customer can be readily modified because the services draw on lists of service independent features which can simply be accessed and changed to modify the services available on a service network. In real-time provision of a service, the infrastructure relies on a blackboard technique in which a request for a service calls up a profile related to the request which identifies features which are available to the user making the request. A feature from the profile will be triggered if, on registering a view with a blackboard (66), necessary scenes for that feature are present on the blackboard (66). If a feature is triggered, it posts the result on the blackboard (66) and processes the scenes which triggered it to provide the service requested.