Deployment of contextual corporate telco services based on protocol adaptation in the NGN environment

Deployment of contextual services is usually constrained to specific areas where contextual behavior can be obtained, mainly due to coverage limitations of context acquisition devices. Although end customers highly appreciate contextual services, those limitations make such services difficult to commercialize. In this article we present a practical deployment of a contextual service offered by a convergent telecommunications operator, whose functionality is to provide intelligent context-based call routing and rerouting, orchestrated from the operator´s service layer. It is based on IMS control layer capabilities to properly capture the situation of the end user in a ubiquitous coverage area. The user´s context is stored in a network-centric element in order to leverage that information across different services, optimizing the system by increasing the quality of the information captured and processed. This implementation proves that value-added contextual services may be built efficiently today using available products and protocols. Since contextual services will likely be a valuable part of a service provider´s portfolio, this implementation can help creators of new contextual services to meet cost and time-to-market objectives.