VRESCo Example Scenario: Number Porting
The Number Porting (NP) example implements a typical scenario of service-oriented computing, in which a telephone (cell phone) number is "ported" from one cell phone operator (CPO) to another.
The idea behind number porting is that customers are able to choose freely between providers of telecommunication services, without having to give up the phone number of their existing contract. When a customer decides to switch from provider CPO1 to CPO2, she signs the new contract and is temporarily assigned a new phone number. In the following, the customer (or, in fact, the new provider CPO2 acting on behalf of the customer) instructs her old provider, CPO1, to issue the number porting process and transfer the existing number to provider CPO2. The NP process as well as the involved internal and external services are depicted in the figure below.
The first step in the process is to contact a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Service in order to look up the customer that is associated with the desired number. Secondly, the partner CPO is determined dynamically. For that purpose, each CPO operating on the market publishes a CPO Service that can be used to query whether a certain number belongs to that CPO. The one CPO answering with a positive response is the partner for this process execution. Next, the Number Porting Service of the partner CPO is invoked to check the portability status. In case porting is not possible at the time, appropriate measures need to be taken. Assuming that no error has occurred, the process can now execute two activities in parallel: performing the actual number porting with the partner Number Porting Service and issuing a bill using the internal Billing Service. As soon as both activities are finished, a report is sent to the customer via the internal notification services (Email Service and SMS Service).
In order to get started with the example, download the sources and open the top-level solution file VReSCO.sln with Microsoft Visual Studio (version 2008 or above). You will find two projects in the folder TELCO Case Study:
- TelcoServices: contains the Web services of the NP example.
For each service, an interface (file IXXX.cs) defines the service contract, and a class implements this interface (file XXX.cs). Additionally, the exchanged messages are modeled as classes that contain the annotation [DataContract]. - TelcoClient: contains the client application, which implements the NP process.
The main implementation file of the project is Program.cs. Additional utility functions are implemented in Util.cs (contains helper methods to create the mapping between interfaces of the Number Porting Service instances) and TelcoModel.cs (used to insert the data model into the VRESCo registry).