IEEE
Communications Magazine
Call For Papers
Feature
Topic: Web Services In Telecommunications
During
the past five years, web services have emerged as a preferred
technology for networked machine-to-machine communications,
application integration, and services interfaces. Web services
technology has been specifically designed to enable a high degree of
interoperability between applications in massively distributed,
networked environments. During this same period, the
Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach for software system
design has gained significant traction in the IT industry. In a SOA
environment, an IT portfolio's functionality is structured into
collections of services that are highly interoperable and loosely
coupled (often communicating with each other through services bus
middleware). SOA promotes re-use, rapid application development, and
simplification of inter-service communications. The development of
highly scalable SOA infrastructure enables strategic agility and cost
efficiencies in an environment of mergers, acquisitions, and business
model transformations. Web services technology is well-matched to SOA
in that it provides standard, interoperable, and automated mechanisms
for describing the service contract for a given service and for
communicating between different service instances.
In order to
enable efficient development of communications applications,
communications services providers and vendors are promoting the SOA
approach and the use of web services as the access and integration
mechanism for communications services. The Parlay X web services
specifications, the ECMA-348 standard, and the recent announcements
of web services/SOA-based offers by major enterprise communications
vendors are strong evidence of the impact that web services is having
on communications applications. The telecommunications industry,
however, is still learning how best to use web services in order to
maximize value, efficiency, and productivity, while trying to keep up
with rapidly evolving web services standards and with the dynamic
needs of service consumers. This feature topic will serve as a forum
for sharing knowledge, experience, and vision with the goal of
improving the industry's collective web services capabilities and
ultimately the value of its communication service offers to
consumers.
SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are invited to
submit complete, unpublished papers that are not under review in any
other conference or journal in any of, but not limited to, the
following or related topic areas:
- Development of applications built upon communications web
services platforms such as Parlay X implementations, ECMA-348 and
ECMA-366 implementations, or communications vendor
implementations
- Descriptions of real-world use cases and
scenarios for communications applications built upon web service
platforms
- Descriptions of highly interoperable
multi-vendor, multi-service communications solutions using web
services as the interoperability technology
- Communications enablement of business process
applications, e.g., CRM, supply-chain management, investment
management, healthcare delivery, etc., using communication web
services
- Web services frameworks and SOA software
solutions in (wireless and IP) in telecommunications environments,
such as solutions that address business challenges of enabling
enterprise adoption of Web services as the corporate IT standard, or
technical challenges of creating highly scalable, and yet secure and
reliable SOA infrastructures.
- Design of web services
for communications services
- Comparisons between web
services and traditional telephony API's
- Communications-specific considerations for availability,
security, performance, workload patterns, interoperability,
reliability, integration, and growth of communications web
services
- Management and Serviceability of communications
systems and applications using web services, particularly MUWS and
WS-Management implementations
- New standards,
techniques, design patterns, or usage patterns that are specific or
unique to web services for communications
- Overviews and
tutorials on web services in the communications
industry
Articles should be tutorial in nature and be of
direct interest to communications professionals involved with the use
of web services in communications solutions. They should be written
in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the
article. Mathematical equations should not be used (although some
simple equations may be allowed if permission is granted by the guest
editors or the Editor-in-Chief). Articles should not exceed 4500
words. Figures and tables should be limited to a combined total of
six. Complete guidelines for prospective authors can be found at:
http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/commag/sub_guidelines.html
Please
send PDF (preferred) or MSWORD formatted papers by December 1, 2006
to Manuscript Central (http://commag-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com),
register or log in, and go to the Author Center. Follow the
instructions there, and select the topic "July 2007/Web Services in
Telecommunications". We strongly encourage all prospective authors to
send a brief letter-of-intent to let the guest editors know that you
are potentially interested in submitting a paper to this special
issue.
SCHEDULE FOR SUBMISSIONS
Submission Deadline:
December 1, 2006
Acceptance Notification: March 1, 2007
Final
Manuscript Submission: May 1, 2007
Publication Date: July
2007
GUEST EDITORS
Ling Liu
Georgia Tech, USA
lingliu@cc.gatech.edu
Sean Moore
Avaya, USA
smoore@avaya.com
Algirdas
Pakstas
London Metropolitan University, UK
a.pakstas@londonmet.ac.uk