A TQM-Based Approach to QoS Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is one of the most interesting and effective concepts of management. Although, as of today, it has been extensively applied to manufacturing and industrial sectors, TQM principles have not received wide acceptance in the area of Telecommunications Network and Service Management. Application of those principles in Telecommunications can be facilitated by employing pertinent techniques and tools. This paper focuses on aspects of the performance management of Telecommunications Networks and Services. As basic quality control mechanisms, two versions of a Dynamic Scaling Service (DSS) are used to regulate the end-user perceived quality: a Crisp DSS and a Fuzzy Logic DSS. A quality-oriented user behavior model is built and a comparative study between the different quality control schemes is presented. Concluding, the paper delineates the scope of TQM with respect to QoS management in telecommunications.     

Model-driven development of composite context-aware web applications

Context-awareness constitutes an essential aspect of services, especially when interaction with end-users is involved. In this paper a solution for the context-aware development of web applications consisting of web services is presented. The methodology proposes a model based approach and advocates in favour of a complete separation of the web application functionality from the context adaptation at all development phases (analysis, design, implementation). In essence, context adaptation takes place on top of and is transparent to the web application business functionality. Starting from UML diagrams of independent web services and respective UML context models, our approach can produce a functional composite context-aware application. At execution level this independence is maintained through an adaptation framework based on message interception.     

INSIGNIA: a pan European trial for the intelligent broadbandnetwork architecture

This article summarizes the work carried out within the ACTS project INSIGNIA, which is targeted at the provision of interactive multimedia services through IN and B-ISDN integration. The basic concepts regarding the integrated approach are discussed with emphasis on the functional architecture. This discussion is followed by a presentation of IN multimedia services which were created based on these principles. An overview of the real-life trials which were conducted on a pan-European basis in order to evaluate the INSIGNIA services is also given. The results of this evaluation are examined from a variety of viewpoints, including functional architecture, user and network equipment, service logic programs and applications, as well as user acceptance and network performance     

Context-aware service engineering: A survey

Context constitutes an essential part of service behaviour, especially when interaction with end-users is involved. As observed from the literature, context handling in service engineering has been during recent years a field of intense research, which has produced several interesting approaches. In this paper, we present research efforts that attempt mainly to decouple context handling from the service logic. We enumerate all context management categories, but focus on the most appropriate for service engineering, namely source code level, model-driven and message interception, taking also into account the fact that these have not been dealt with in detail in other surveys. A representative example is used to illustrate more precisely how these approaches can be used. Finally, all three categories are compared based on a number of criteria.