Policy lifecycle and policy enabled telecom open service delivery platform

Policies provide flexible grammar to describe the capabilities, requirements and general characteristics. In loosely-coupled Web services domain, policy has been considered as a possible mechanism to describe the characteristics of services, associate and evolve with these services dynamically. However there lacks a systematic framework to take into account the employment of policies in Web services as a whole. In this paper, based on the lifecycle of policies, a general policy framework for Web services is proposed, including policy generation, enforcement, publication, negotiation and evolution. In different modules of the framework, a set of mechanisms and tools are discussed and presented. At the end of the paper, a policy enabled telecom open service delivery platform is presented. Telecom operators open their network capabilities through deploying their services as Web services on the platform, following Parlay X Web services specification. Third-party value added service providers use WSDL and policies to access services. Policy framework, including security policy, reliable messaging policy and other QoS policy management has proved its efficiency in the real world system.