Service-oriented Network Selection

The trend of merging telecommunication infrastructures with traditional IT infrastructures is becoming increasingly more common. The driver behind this development is partly the strong need for enhanced services from the telecom operator's side aiming for value added services provision to the customer. The effect of this new trend is that existing value chains in the Telco infrastructure will disappear and the merge between the Telco infrastructure and the IT infrastructure can bring added value to the Telco's network, which is needed in order to increase the willingness to pay for the services. Thus, Telecom operators are very keen on participating in the overall service delivery chain being placed on top of their transport infrastructure. This paper proposes a method, to help to propel the previously mentioned trend by enabling the user to query for aggregated composed services directly from the network edge. A network selection is therefore achived based on the services provided by the access network and their capabilities and costs, parallel to other traditional pure network-related parameters such as signal strength and network QoS.