Use Case
Mobile Value Added Service Delivery Platform
A value-added service (VAS) is a popular telecommunications industry term for non-core services, or, in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. However, it can be used in any service industry, for services available at little or no cost, to promote their primary business. In the telecommunications industry, on a conceptual level, value-added services add value to the standard service offering, spurring subscribers to use their phone more and allowing the operator to drive up their average revenue per user.
Mobile VAS services can be categorized into:
Consumer behavior VAS
Network VAS
Enterprise VAS
A distinction may also be made between standard (peer-to-peer) content and premium-charged content. These are called mobile value-added services (MVAS), which are often simply referred to as VAS. Value-added services are supplied either in-house by the mobile network operator themselves or by a third-party value-added service provider, also known as a content provider.
This use case refers to the composition of a workload to deliver value added services in a mobile network. In this article we won't refer specifically to one service or application but to the overall workload capabilities. Our objective being to bring together the widest set of capabilities to enable the fast and easy creation of new services for mobile subscribers regardless if they are serviced by the 3G, 4G or 5G core network.
Reference Mobile Value Added Services Workload
The service delivery workload capacity can be extended by adding more AEFs or AFs instances and the workload capablity set can be extended by adding new AEFs and AFs. Each AEFs or AFs can be upgrated independantly from the other and to insure service continuity, an old version of an engine can co-reside with a new version of an engine until the old versions are decommissioned.
The following diagram describes the Single Endpoint Session Application Function (SES-AF), which can be use to implement simple services. In this example the SES-AF implements a VPN service. Triggered by the incoming call, it queries the common data store (CDS-AEF) to retrieve the subcriber profile and redirect the call to the correct routable number. The respective AEF will configure the response to the core network according to the protocol it implements abdtracting thought to the service logic implemented in the SES-AF to be aware of the specific telecom protocol structure.
We don't have any limitation or restriction on the number of services implemented in a single AF or the number of AF that runs a same service. It is at implementation time that we can decide how to proper distribute our workload to make sure it remains as dynamic and as elastic as needed.
The key values for using a cloud native workload as a service delivery platform are:
Applicable to any public or private cloud infrastructure
Decomposed architecture that allows cost effective operation and continuous delivery
Elastic composition that allows to scale up and down in capacity but also in capabilities
Application implemented using OpenAPI specitications allows combination with external APIs as well as internal APIs.
Is the CAPIF Core Function a single point of failure?
The CAPIF Core Function is a stateless microservice. Many service instances can be executed at once using one same common data store. The CAPIF-CF is never a single point of failure since you would typically run more than one service instance in a production deployment and not data is lost in case a container restart due to the stateless implementation. Read more about CAPIF-CF here.