Number Portability and Messaging Architecture within SDP

The Number Portability and messaging architecture in the Oracle Service Delivery Platform (SDP) framework comprises the following components. Event Manager is the core component.

• Communication Protocol Adapter

• Order Processing Engine

• Workflow Engine

• Fulfillment Engine

• Event Manager

• SDP Repository

Communication Protocol Adapter

Communication Protocol Adapter interfaces between SDP and external systems. It handles the following message flow:

• Incoming orders are taken by the appropriate Communication Protocol Adapter and passed to SDP.

• Out going messages are passed from SDP to an external system.

It supports the following adapters:

• File/FTP. This supports a batch mode processing.

• HTTP

• Script

• Interactive Adapter, such as, Telnet sessions

Order Processing Engine

Orders from an order management system are converted to SDP Work Items or logical line items. Orders are also created internally from processing the messages.

These line items created are analyzed by Dependency Manager or Order Analyzer. It creates a final set of Normalized Work Items for execution.

Workflow Engine

This module specifies the actual flow of actions (known as Fulfillment Actions) to be executed to satisfy an application functionality. This module can re-use the Fulfillment Actions to customize any new functionality such as NP Service Provider Mediation or the NRC itself.

The Workflow Engine would determine the Fulfillment Actions to execute for each Work Item and determine the Network Elements that it would need to talk to. The Workflow engine also picks and executes an appropriate fulfillment procedure based on the fulfillment element type, software version of the fulfillment element type and the adapter type.

The fulfillment procedures then use the Internet Message Studio generated code to send and process messages. Once it gets an event notification of the outcome of the execution of the Fulfillment Action (by the Event Manager), the engine would proceed to complete the Work Item and pick the next Work Item in the queue for the given order. This component uses the Oracle Workflow engine.

Fulfillment Engine

The Fulfillment Actions and the Network Elements on which they need to be applied are used by SDP's provisioning engine to determine which Fulfillment Program to execute.This essentially uses the PL/SQL engine in the database currently to execute user defined procedures.

Event Manager

The Event Manager is a generic Publish-Subscribe module which registers interest of various subscribers to different event types. The subscriber could be the SDP Translator (in which case the event gets propagated as a new order), Workflow Engine (in which case the event restarts a Workflow which is waiting on an external event) or an API. Event Manager builds asynchronous application messaging. It has a versatile set of API's which can be used by a developer to build asynchronous message based application.

SDP Repository

The core SDP repository allows the user to create orders and configure network elements. An example would be Work Item, Fulfillment Action, Fulfillment Program and Network Element definitions. The NP database contains entities for storing NP specific data such as, Subscription Version, Service Providers, Routing Numbers,...