The Potential for Autonomic Service Delivery Platforms

This paper examines the emerging concept of Service Delivery Platforms (SDP’s), which promise to provide a much-needed, focused abstraction and architecture for a variety of tasks related to the delivery of advanced and value-added mobile and converging communication services. We propose that, given the ever-growing complexity of those tasks and heterogeneity of the communication facilities a SDP is required to incorporate and abstract, autonomic capabilities should become a native part of the functionality of SDP’s, so that the management and mediation of services and other facets of the delivery architecture are managed in a self-adaptive fashion. We identify some major elements in a SDP that are appropriate targets for the injection of autonomic capabilities, and we outline how they could benefit service execution, network abstraction, and service exposure.