ERCIM News No.35 - October 1998

WebStore - A Web-based Secure Multimedia Document Store

by Thomas Gringel

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Telecommunication services are becoming more and more data intensive in several areas such as network control, network management, billing services, traffic analysis, service management, service marketing, customer care and fraud detection. For several of these applications, fast access and secure data storage over a longer period of time is crucial. Given the increasing amount of network traffic, registering and retrieving of these data requires very large databases in the order of TeraBytes.

One project at GMD Institute for Open Communicatin Systems is designing a managed Web-based secure multimedia document store, called WebStore. A file system based version has been developed in the ACTS Project Prospect in 1998. An improved will be finished in the near future which will be based on current TINA (Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture) service access and service management specifications. The WebStore potentially provides the necessary features to become a commercial service in the evolving pan-European Open Service Market (OSM) environment and could be used to demonstrate a set of business processes to be automated in such environments. It is intended to use the WebStore as a service being provided by a 3rd party provider in context of the TINA business model.

The WebStore service will be used to demonstrate scenarios for the automation of business processes between service providers, network operators and customers. This includes management services such as Order Handling (Subscription), Off- and On-line Service Configuration, Service Instantiation (via service factory), as well as QoS Management, Problem Handling (TTS), Invoicing/Collection (Accounting/ Payment). To overcome today’s shortcomings of Internet/Web based services, ie no guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for multimedia services, insufficient security, service monitoring and control, customer care, etc. The required security and management functions are being developed based on ODP (Open Distributed Processing), NMF (Network Management Forum) and TINA concepts.

The WebStore utilises existing and forthcoming database technology, predominantly Oracle database and management software. It is planed to use the Oracle 8 Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) for persistency of management data as well as for the storeage and retrieval of documents up to the size of 4 Gigabyte.

Future Activities

It is planed to use the Oracle Application Server 4.0 as middleware platform to combine Oracle’s ideas of Network Computing Architecture (NCA) with concepts of the TINA service architecture and the distributed processing environment (DPE). This middleware technology offers a large scalability using ‘Cartridges’ which can be plugged within the Oracle environment. The access to these cartridges is provided via both HTTP- and CORBA 2.0/IIOP-Interfaces.

Please contact:

Thomas Gringel - GMD
Tel: +49 30 3463 7166
E-mail: gringel@fokus.gmd.de