Patent ID: 7953877
Filing Date: 2011-05-31
Classification: H04L,H04Q,H04W

Abstract:
1. A telecommunications system comprising: one or more processors and a non-transitory storage medium containing instructions, which when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to implement: a service capability module, residing on the non-transitory storage medium, that receives a request from an application that resides in an untrusted domain, said request being directed to a subscriber device in a telecommunications network; a plug-in manager that retrieves one or more plug-ins to handle the request, wherein each of the one or more plug-ins represents a particular network device in the telecommunications network, device including at least one of the following: a short messaging service center (SMS-C), a multimedia messaging service center (MMS-C), and a parlay gateway of the telecommunications network; a first Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) residing on the service capability module to enforce service capabilities, wherein the first PEP determines whether to grant to deny the request according to a service being invoked by the request and according to at least one temporal condition; a second PEP residing on the plug-in manager to enforce network protection by coordinating traffic among the network devices to enhance network traffic efficiency, wherein the second PEP routes the request to a selected network device; a policy engine containing a set of policy rules loaded into memory of said policy engine, wherein the policy rules can be added and updated at runtime; a Policy Decision Point (PDP) residing on the policy engine, wherein said PDP makes a policy decision by employing the set of policy rules; wherein upon receiving the request from the application, the first PEP forwards data in the request to the PDP in the policy engine that evaluates the request, modifies or adds new data to the request, and informs the first PEP of the policy decision, wherein the first PEP then enforces said policy decision on the request and queries the plug-in manager for a list of possible plug-ins to handle the request; and wherein upon receiving the request from the first PEP, the plug-in manager retrieves the list of possible plug-ins based on an address plan and destination address of the request and sends the list of possible plug-ins to the policy engine, wherein the policy engine makes a decision based on one or more of: request data, general network gatekeeping rules, specific data in the service provider traffic service level agreement (SLA) or additional data from external databases, wherein the policy engine returns the list of possible plug-ins that have passed the decision to the plug-in manager or informs the plug-in manager that no plug-in has passed the decision, wherein the plug-in manager selects a plug-in from the list of possible plug-ins and sends the plug-in to the service capability module, and wherein the service capability module routes the request to said plug-in.