Competencies and technologies for the evolution towards virtualized networks
The past decade has been characterized by a series of technological innovations that have radically changed our customs as citizens, workers and consumers.
Among these, a leading role has certainly been played by the convergence of the voice and media services more in general into an IP network as well as the evolution and diffusion of the mobile data networks and terminals (smartphone, tablet, etc.).
Exprivia managed immediately to take the opportunities created by these technological revolutions concentrating on the more promising operating scenarios in terms of benefits for the customer and adoption by the end users through their distinctive competencies in the following sectors:
- development of applications closely integrated with the most common mobile platforms, starting from Nokia Symbian in 2006 up to the modern-day iOS and Android platforms;
- Integration of the media services on IP and their business processes with the customer's infrastructure and platform, whether the customer is a Telco operator or a company.
Today, Exprivia has a Competence Center for the design and production of VoIP and Media solutions with a particular inclination for the mobile world.
The key aspects on which the staff of the Competence Center concentrates during the design and production of solutions are associated with the experience of the end user for integration with the customer's technological scenario and business:
User Experience
The success of a solution, and thus the degree to which the business objectives are reached, is proportionate to its rate of adoption by the end users. The end user normally adopts what is simple, safe and user-friendly.
Exprivia's skills with the SDK and NDK of the main mobile OS enable it to produce user-friendly paradigms, thus concealing from the end user complex logic such as:
- interaction with the hardware components of the terminal in real time (microphone, loudspeaker, native interfaces of the device);
- integration of distinct network services, such as WiFi, mobile phone and GPS.
Application performances
Voice & Media requires real-time content management. This means knowing how to manage critical aspects concerning the audio/video quality in particular on mobile devices that may be powerful but always have limitations in terms of computational resources and battery power.
The Exprivia solutions are optimized in terms of:
1. Audio/video quality:
- IN/OUT jitter management
- Latency handling
- Codec efficiency
- Packet loss concealment (PLC) / large delay & jitter robustness
- Audio process / thread priority and scheduling behaviour
- Audio processing selection built-in/custom tuned (NS and AGC)
2. Reachability
- Ability to maintain always on reachability for incoming call & messages
- Correct NAT & keep alive handling
- Ability to adapt to network connection changes quickly
3. Energy and hardware resource consumption (memory and CPU)
- Triggered device wake up and their duration
- Battery usage during idle mode (no call in progress)
- Battery usage during in call mode
- Memory usage during idle mode
- Memory usage during in call mode
- Ability to release no longer needed resources
4. Stability
- Critical condition handling
- Quick response to user commands
- Safe device integration
Voice & Media Service Integration
The end user side applications exchange media contents and signalling data with networks and platforms in accordance with standards based on the following protocols:
- SIP-RTP (Voce in chiaro)
- TLS-SRTP/ZRTP (voce cifrata)
- RTMP (Video streaming)
The Exprivia solutions undergo strict interoperability tests before being released in operation, which include the certification of adaptations necessary to guarantee compliance with custom environments or functions.
Our solutions are integrated and interoperable with the most popular platforms:
- Italtel
- Cisco
- Nokia Alcatel
- Comverse
- Asterisk
- Freeswitch
- …and many others.
Business Process Integration
The Exprivia solutions have a software component that guarantees integration in the customer's business processes, with particular reference to the Provisioning & Administration processes of the mobile applications.
The mobile app provisioning & administration and the integration with the Customer’s business processes are implemented through the interaction with the Exprivia Service Orchestrator platform.
The Orchestrator is based on Jboss and MySQl database technology and acts as middlleware for intermediation between client applications and the customer's business platforms.
The Orchestrator can implement flexible workflows and adapters in order to be quickly integrated with many processes and platforms enabling complex provisioning and authentication scenarios like those adopted by the telco operators. The Service Orchestrator makes the protocols and information management logic transparent to the end user and implements additional functions, such as:
- Access control
- Data caching
- Communication campaign management
- Integration with third-party services (e.g. Google & Apple Push Notification)
- Software update management
