Resumen de Contribution to operation support systems and service management architectures for user-centric telecommunications services over next generation networks
Supported by Next Generation Network realizations and by Service Oriented Architectures, the new IP-based ICT world is blurring the borders between the traditionally separated Internet and Telecommunications industries. This enables new competition to be introduced in the service creation and delivery domain, which was previously constrained to a selected set of operators' partners. To keep the pace with new entrants, telecom operators are introducing fresh paradigms that engage new actors in the value chain e.g. User-Generated Services. The so-called user-centric environments support the fast development and supply of innovative User-Generated Services by enabling non-technically skilled users to create, share, discover and enjoy their own designs. By involving users in the service conception process telcos aim to have customers environments revealed and come up with new unique ideas that fulfil users' latent needs and user-experience expectations. Additionally, these new paradigms may contribute to save development and marketing expenses, thus helping to increase the revenue per bit carried.
Although the benefits that user-centric service creation and delivery platforms bring to the Telecommunications domain are potentially enormous, there are many challenges that operators must solve first. To begin with, the business models that can be applied are not clear. Additionally, the fact that users are allowed to create their own services and drive their lifecycles pose great challenges to current operations and support systems. On top of that, user-centric services are expected to intensively make use of end-users personal information, which may arise many concerns regarding privacy and personal information protection.
This dissertation has met these challenges by proposing a set of original contributions that may help to solve the detected problems. First, the author has proposed a business model that describes the actors and relationships involved. In addition, a study has been carried out that assesses the potential target groups and that analyzes the value network and the revenue generation mechanisms. The business context description for usercentric platforms has been complemented with an explanation of the technological fundamentals.
Going deeper into technical details, the author has focused on the operation and management of user-centric service creation and delivery platforms. Traditional support systems do not consider the customer involvement in the services management, and thus a review of the business processes involved has been conducted following the TeleManagement Forum Next Generation Operations Systems and Software framework. As a result, an architecture for the management and operation of usercentric platforms has been proposed. The proposal includes several original contributions, among which we have focused on the information model that describes User-Generated Services and supports their management and operation, and the privacy infrastructure that allows users to govern and decide on the use and release of their identity information.
The original contributions elaborated by the author have been validated in several prototypes developed during Master Thesis that the author has tutored or has collaborated with. Furthermore, validation has been possible also within national and international research projects the author has been involved in.
In addition, the original contributions have been used to provide further research and scientific results by means of publications in relevant journals and conferences. Some of the results of this dissertation have been also awarded after submission to different conferences and prizes. The contributions have also provided industrial results by means of an international patent application and contributions submitted to first class telecom-oriented standard development organizations.
