Networks and New Services ― A Complete Story

This book shines a beam of light towards tomorrow's network architectures and their emerging service environments, while considering the transformation that has already taken place. From the perspective of the rapid changes that have already shaken the industry, the authors examine the road ahead for communications: - is it a consolidation of technologies or a structural transformation? One thing is clear - the future communication environment will be fundamentally different from what we experience today.

The book presents an analysis of the major catalytic shifts that are shaping the telecommunications world: Software-Defined Networking, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing. These technologies can be deployed in traditional ways, and transform services via a 'slow burn' approach, or can be constructed as bolder designs of advanced infrastructures that revolutionize the whole landscape and its value chains.

When searching for the appropriate strategic path, this book can guide the reader through the maze of possible architectural choices, driven by discriminating, and sometimes conflicting business considerations. The book shows how these different technologies can be integrated, and how such integration can enable new services, and probably new business opportunities.

Software assumes a definitive role in the vision of the future network, in every industry, including communications. In particular, the integration of new ICT capabilities will continue to shape the evolution of communication systems towards a new smarter environment that will enrich human communication. This process of 'softwarization' disrupts the current status quo at equipment development, network installation, network management, operations and business levels. The effects change who the stakeholders are, how they interact and what roles they play. Hence, it is important to understand the impact of steps towards softwarization and turn the effects into advantages.

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In future, ICT ecosystem could latch on to new technologies that enable an entirely new paradigm, e.g. smart environments where the application domains are backed up by shared networking, not individual networks that also support some applications. Characterized by its unique user-centric approach, this book presents a view of evolution driven by the need to satisfy the human requirements, whether in person-to-person or in machine interactions. Growing user power is becoming a key motivator in reforming the communication paradigm and in accelerating the softwarization process. 

Noel Crespi holds Masters degrees from the Universities of Orsay and Canterbury, a Diplome d’ingenieur from Telecom ParisTech and a Ph.D and Habilitation from Paris VI University. From 1993-95 he worked at CLIP, Bouygues Telecom, before joining France Telecom R&D in 1995 where he was involved in Intelligent Network paradigms for value added services. For Orange he led the Mobicarte prepaid service project to define, architect and deploy an infrastructure that hosted more than 10 million mobile subscribers. He has played a key role in standardisation as a delegate in a number of committees and as the editor for CAMEL, the Intelligent Network standard for mobile networks. He was appointed as the coordinator for France Telecom’s standardisation activities for Core Network and then for all GSM/UMTS standards at the ETSI plenary committee.
In 1999, he joined Nortel Networks as telephony programme manager for France and Middle East-Africa. He was responsible for the evolution of the switching area, and led key programmes for the evolution of Nortel products. He has also worked for ETSI as an independent contractor. He joined Institut Mines-Telecom in 2002 and is currently Professor and MSc Programme Director, leading the?Service Architecture Laboratory. He coordinates the standardisation activities for Institut Telecom at ETSI, 3GPP and ITU-T. He is also adjunct professor at KAIST (Korea), and is on the 4-person Scientific Advisory Board of FTW (Austria). His current research interests are in Service Architectures, Communication Services, Social Networks, and Internet of Things/Services. He is the author/co-author of 250 articles and contributions in standardisation

Roberto Minerva, has a Master Degree in Computer Science from Bari University, Italy, and a Ph.D in computer Science and Telecommunications from Telecom Sud Paris, France. Roberto is the head of Innovative Architectures group within the Future Centre in?the Strategy Department of Telecom Italia. His job is to create advanced scenarios derived from the application of emerging ICT technologieswith innovative business models especially in the area of IoT, distributed computing, programmable networks and personal data. He held many responsibilities within Telecom Italia Lab: Network Intelligence, Wireless Architecture and Business Services Area Manager.Roberto is also a contract Professor at Turin’s Polytechnics teaching a course on mobile services. Roberto is the Chairman of the IEEE IoT Initiative aiming at creating within IEEE a large technical community and to leverage the knowledge and skills available within IEEE. Since 1987 he has been involved in the development of Service Architectures for Telecom (TINA, OSA/Parlay and SIP), inactivities related to IMS, and in the definition of services for the Business market (context-awareness, ambient intelligence and automotive). More recently his contribution is in the area of new architectures for the service provision with particular attention to data centric and user centric solutions. Under this perspective he is currently involved in Telecom Italia activities related to Big Data, architecture for IoT, and ICT technologies for leveraging Cultural Heritage.