The FRIENDS platform - A software platform for advanced services and applications

New high-speed networks provide new opportunities for service providers to offer advanced voice, data, and multimedia services. This paper describes an extendible framework for the efficient creation and deployment of services. The framework integrates the needs of service providers, service developers, and end users within a single coherent architecture. In this architecture, services are composed of distributed software components. The framework provides the infrastructure for component interaction and encourages reuse of service logic from a rich set of basic components. This paper describes details of both the infrastructure and the components that implement the reusable service logic. The application of the service framework is illustrated by a case study of a multi-party service for collaborative work in project teams. The integration of the service framework and the Lucent Softswitch is a promising direction for future research.