Distributed service provision using open APIs-based middleware: “OSA/Parlay vs. JAIN” performance evaluation study

Demand for value added services creates significant revenue opportunities for operators that decide to open their networks to external service providers. This process is practically feasible only if standardized interfaces to core network operations are utilized. This way the cost and complexity of the development and integration process is reduced, as well as the service administration overhead, which is distributed among service providers and does not burden the network operator. Most existing solutions for standardized access to core network operations follow the middleware paradigm that encapsulates network operations and provides open interfaces to outside service providers. The main concern about this approach has always been the performance impact of the additional architectural layers on top of the core network architecture. Different middleware technologies such as distributed object technologies and messaging middleware have been proposed and applied, all with varying performance results. The scope of this paper is to investigate and compare the performance impact inflicted by two such solutions encapsulating network call control functions. The first one is an OSA/Parlay based call control implementation with CORBA and RMI serving as underlying distributed object technologies and the second one is a JAIN call control implementation, again with an RMI underlying messaging framework. All performance measurements are taken in the context of a real-time “call forwarding” service translated from a corresponding VoIP SIP-based implementation.