OMA would like to inform all the organisations subscribed to the IETF new-work list of the approval of 1 new work item:
1 General Service Subscription Management (GSSM) WI:
The
objective of this work item is to specify a general service subscription
management function in
OSE, that
is expected to cover management of all services subscriptions within an
operator/service provider’s domain.
Service subscription describes the agreement between the subscriber and
operator/service provider, based on which the subscriber is allowed to consume
the service, and charged according to an agreed rate. Service subscription is
very essential information for operators and service providers, since at least
the following actions would pertain to service subscription
information:
Ÿ
Authorization
for a service: by checking if a subscriber is subscribed to a service,
operator/service provider can control if the subscriber is allowed to access a
service (subscriber-initiated service), or if the service application is allowed
to push a content to a subscriber (application-initiated
service);
Ÿ
Charging:
service subscription is one of the major references for charging.
Service subscription describes (among other pieces of information like
service customization and other subscription parameters) the service
availability for a subscriber (e.g., if the subscriber is subscribed to a
WAP-based “mobile weather forecast” service). Currently, the management of service
subscription information is not yet specified in OMA, and therefore it simply
could be assumed to be either subsumed by other enabler implementation or by the
application implementing a service. Each of these approaches has its drawbacks,
since this ambiguity may lead to unnecessary complexity and silo approaches that
should be avoided wherever possible, in compliance with the OSE
architecture:
Ÿ
Increased
cost and complexity: each service enabler/application server has to manage
subscriber identity, subscriptions and (optionally) billing
individually.
Ÿ
Poor
usability: possibly
various subscription flows and requirements for subscribing different services,
and there exists inability to express cross-application subscription
preferences.
Ÿ
Management
difficulty: poor design for management of service subscription information for
different services since they are managed by different network
elements
that are within or without the operator/service provider’s domain.
According
to the description above, there is value in identifying a
general service subscription management (GSSM) function
which decouples
access to service subscription from its actual representation and the location
of the data by providing:
Ÿ
a
single
point of access to service subscription across multiple instances of a service
(e.g. multiple PoC servers)
Ÿ
a unique
interface to subscriber data across multiple services (e.g. PoC, IM,
etc.).
The
GSSM work item
will address at
least the
following features
related
to service subscription management:
Ÿ
Dynamic
manipulation (add, update, remove, pause, resume) of service
subscription;
Ÿ
Service
subscription provisioning, i.e. doing all the steps needed in order to fulfil a
service subscription request from a subscriber);
Ÿ
Service
subscription verification for requests by a subscriber for a service application
(or the reverse direction);
Note that in this Work Item, no assumption is being made on the service subscription data storage location; the focus is primarily on the means to access such data for provisioning purpose or for viewing purpose.
This work item has been allocated to the OMA ARC (Architecture WG) for specification development.
Best regards,
Victoria Gray on behalf of OMA.
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