Generic architecture for provisioning Internet advanced services

Recent advances in the Internet to access services available in other networks, such as IP telephony of PSTN and video services of cable networks, do not benefit all potential users unless the services are easily accessible and affordable. Towards meeting this requirement, the paper presents a service model which allows advanced services, such as telephony and video services rather than basic IP services, to be defined and provided to users through an Internet-based service access network. In providing the service, a provider dynamically configures and manages user devices as well as network devices. This allows any users to request and use the services with minimum effort. Towards this end, the paper proposes a service architecture which uses the emerging policy framework to manage the service complexity within the service access network. With the policy framework in place to execute policies associated with each service, it is expected that any service creation will involve primarily defining and executing policies for the new services. Examples showing such policy definitions and executions for various service components are given to illustrate the policy-based service creation and management.