In today's mobile network operator's environment, services are mainly created and installed as independent subsystem ("silo" approach). As a consequence, each new service needs extensive installation and integration effort. One advantage of 3GPP's "IP Multimedia Subsystem" (IMS) is to provide a common, horizontal control layer that is re-used across a multitude of different services.

On the service layer, modern Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) need to provide also horizontal integrated sub-layers for operation and management, provisioning, system administration, security, and others. The most suitable solution can be offered by re-usable service enablers and a supporting open service architecture. OMA has considered these aspects in the OSE approach.

As competition between network operators will move to the service layer, fast creation of new services will become a decisive factor. A Service Creation Environment exposes the features of the Service Delivery Platform to application developers. Today's SCE are built on mature distributed object-oriented technologies. This allows meeting the carrier-grade quality requirements using off-the-shelf components. Furthermore, as these technologies are known from the IT area, more software developers are already educated on them thus broadening the pool of available developers. Thirdly, standardization in the Open Mobile Alliance has identified a set of common service enablers (such as presence, instant messaging, chat, push-to-talk) that can be re-used for different services.

The Service Creation Environment developed at NL-E is build to create new services on top of NEC IMS application servers. The SCE is using the J2EE technology and provides the API for presence, push-to-talk, chat, and others. The API connect to a PEEM (Policy Evaluation, Enforcement and Management) module that allow to enforce policies on the requests send to the network. The real interface to the network is the Framework Capability Control (FCC) layer. A connector architecture allow to dynamically plug in new services into the FCC. For IMS services, we have implemented the JAIN SIP/SIMPLE interfaces.

In the future, we will focus on further developing the policy management and the FCC to support a variety of different underlying service delivery platforms. Furthermore, we will look on terminal issues when integrating a multitude of services.

A. Schülke, E. Kovacs, H. Stüttgen, A. Akkawi, M. Kuhnen, A. Riu, F. Winkler, Creating New Communication Services Efficiently, NEC Journal on Advanced Technologies, 2005.

A. Schuelke, D. Abbadessa, F. Winkler, Service Delivery Platform: Critical Enabler To Service Providers' New Revenue Stream, World Telecommunications Congress 2006, Budapest/Hungary, Best Paper Award, April 2006.

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