20 Oracle Communications Universal User Profile

20.1 What is Oracle Communications Universal User Profile?

Oracle Communications Universal User Profile is a stateless subscriber identity service that aggregates and normalizes subscriber data from the various systems that may exist in a telecommunications organization. As telecommunications organizations have grown from land-line to ISP to mobile systems, the number of repositories have also grown exponentially. To take advantage of the new business opportunities enabled by these new services—as well as to reduce the cost of delivering service to customers—a single view of subscriber identity must be provided to applications.

To provide a single view of subscriber identity to applications, several challenges must be addressed, including:

• Due to mergers, acquisitions and subsidiaries, subscriber data may be distributed across multiple systems with different keys.

• Internal organizational data-politics, external regulations, and because the data likely will be out of date if it must be synchronized, it is impossible to merge all data into a single universal repository.

• Applications require data in application specific views.

• Multiple aspects related to protecting identity data.

• The process of duplicating all the storage, security, and back-ups of the existing data while copying it to a different location is an enormous task—one that typically is not a viable option for most organizations.

Oracle Communications Universal User Profile solves the challenges described in the preceding list by providing a stateless, carrier-grade solution that delivers a standard, single point of contact for subscriber identity information. Instead of copying data into a centralized repository, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile retrieves the required data on demand and presents it in a format required by the application.

Additionally, because Oracle Communications Universal User Profile is stateless and integrates with key related technologies such as Oracle's TimesTen In-Memory Database, Service Delivery Platform, and SOA Suite, it can be used to enable "smart-routing" to meet the demands of a telecommunications solution.

The standard interfaces to Oracle Communications Universal User Profile include LDAP and SOAP, and by default, it can access data in LDAP, Relational Database, or Diameter HSS repositories. Oracle Communications Universal User Profile also provides a custom Java API to leverage data in XCAP, Web Services, and any other system Java can connect to.

20.2 Example Oracle Communications Universal User Profile Use Cases and Deployment Scenarios

This topic describes example use cases and deployment scenarios for Oracle Communications Universal User Profile, including:

• Enabling Double or Triple Play Services

• Improving Organic Social Networking

• Mid-Call Move

• Smart Package Routing

Enabling Double or Triple Play Services

Many telecommunications companies provide multiple types of service, including mobile/land-line, ISP, and television (cable or fiber) services. As a result, many of these telecommunications companies attempt to "cross-sell" their multiple services to customers that do not currently subscribe to all of them.

In this type off situation, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile can be used to aggregate data from various systems to help build both a marketing campaign and a customer portal to improve the user experience when dealing with the telecommunications company.

For example, to enable the marketing campaign, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile can be used with a BPEL work-flow to:

1. Find all mobile subscribers that are not television subscribers

2. Send them a Short Message Service (SMS) message that provides a coupon for a reduced price if they enroll in a television service within a certain time period, say, with in the next four hours

To accomplish this, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile pulls data from:

• Both mobile and television billing systems to determine which customers have which service

• The contact database to determine customer phone numbers and phone capabilities

• The HSS information repository to determine if customers are on-line and capable of meeting the four hour deadline

Using BPEL allows the workflow to be segregated for performance, reliability, and also so that the marketing group can not see customer names and contact information, thereby protecting subscriber's identity information.

Improving Organic Social Networking

While the popularity of social networks is rapidly growing online, social networks have always naturally occurred in our physical, non-electronic communities. In reality however, it is often easier to communicate with the thousands of people in your electronic social network that you have never met face-to-face, than it is to communicate with 10-15 people that you informally associate with by circumstance, say, the parents of the children on a youth athletic team.

Imagine you coach a youth athletic team and one day during practice a rain storm begins unexpectedly. If you wanted to cancel the practice because of the rain it can be very hard, if not impossible for you to contact all the parents of the children in a timely fashion.

However, using Oracle's Web Center, Service Delivery Platform, and Oracle Communications Universal User Profile, telecommunication companies can build a mobile Web application that can address a situation like this and contact the parents of the all children quickly. If you decide to cancel the practice, you could leave a voice or text message on a custom, billable service which would then relay the message to the parents of the children using the team's address book.

In this situation, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile provides:

• access to the coach's credentials to authenticate to the application

• the attribute that authorizes the call

• the team address book, which could have information such as the primary contact number and whether the phone can receive Short Message Service (SMS) or voice only messages

Mid-Call Move

The concept of "Mid-Call Move" refers to a service that allows a person on the phone to have the current call re-directed to different phone. For example, imagine you are participating in a conference call at your desk at work, but you need to leave the office. A Mid-Call Move would allow you to press a certain phone number combination on the desk phone, for example, star then 7, and transfer the conference call to your mobile phone. In this situation, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile can be used to determine whether you have enrolled in the Mid-Call Move service, and if so, to then look up your mobile phone number before initiating the transfer.

Smart Package Routing

Imagine while at work, you ordered 1,000 parts and had them sent to Facility A in Atlanta, Georgia. Later you realize you made a mistake and the 1,000 parts are actually needed at Facility B in Boston, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, you do not know the address at Facility B in Boston and you do not know who to notify at either Facility A or B to communicate the situation.

To address a situation like this, a shipping service could be integrated with your office phone service so that a mobile web application could be used to track the package, select a different route, and also notify the correct people—all by selecting the proper office name. In this scenario, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile provides cost-center information for the billing of the package, authorization allowing you to change the package routing, and addresses of the various facilities.

20.3 Oracle Communications Universal User Profile Diameter Adapters

In today's telecommunications environments, subscriber information may be contained in a IMS-compliant Home Subscriber Service (HSS). One of the features of Oracle Communications Universal User Profile is the Diameter adapter. The Diameter adapter enables Oracle Communications Universal User Profile to:

• Connect to 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Home Subscriber Systems that run over the Diameter protocol

• Present a standardized service layer for subscriber identity information regardless of the information's source

This topic contains the following sections:

• Enabling Support for Diameter Adapters

• Creating and Configuring Diameter Adapters

20.4 Mapping IMS 3GPP Schema to LDAP Schema

Oracle Communications Universal User Profile supports version 6 Sh user profile as defined in the 3GPP TS 29.328 specification (which Oracle recommends becoming familiar with to understand IMS user profiles).

schema.diameter.xml is the Oracle Communications Universal User Profile mapped LDAP schema and defines an LDAP orclHSSProfile objectclass containing the following attributes:

• orclHSSPublicId: Maps to the Public User Identity IMS user profile as defined in the 3GPP TS 23.008 specification. orclHSSPublicId is the filter attribute typically used to query the HSS Sh profile.

• orclHSSServiceProfile: In ldapsearch results orclHSSServiceProfile contains the binary value of the XML document contained in the User-Data attribute-value pair of the Diameter Response message. This XML document conforms to version 6 Sh XSD.

  In ldapmodify requests orclHSSServiceProfile contains the RepositoryData serviceIndicator to be updated in the following format:

  <serviceIndicator>:<serviceIndicator_value>
  

• orclHSSMSISDN: An alternative to orclHSSPublicId, orclHSSMSISDN maps to the Mobile Station ISDN Number as defined in the 3GPP TS23.008 specification.

Example Entry

Generally, the Diameter data will be linked to a core record via the Join View adapter. For example, the subscriber's core record exists in the billing database but the phone's actual capabilities are stored in the HSS server. The following is an example of what the data may appear like when retrieved and printed out as an LDIF file:

uid=user1,ou=uup2,dc=imc,dc=com
givenname=Jane
sn=Doe
telephonenumber=15551234567
objectclass=top
objectclass=person
objectclass=organizationalperson
objectclass=inetorgperson
objectclass=orclHSSProfile
uid=user1
cn=Jane Doe
title=Associate
authpassword;oid={SASL/MD5}CPvyoxkufZJ69n0YBwfPsw==
authpassword;oid={SASL/MD5-DN}JnDX4y0mf8vdN1dAHVutDw==
authpassword;oid={SASL/MD5-U}/a3vgMwtjQKe8dEcAdxQwQ==
orclHSSPublicId=user1
orclHSSServiceProfile=<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?>
<Sh-Data>
<RepositoryData>
  <PublicIdentifiers>
    <IMSPublicIdentity>
   sip:test.user@test.company.com
    </IMSPublicIdentity>
  </PublicIdentifiers>
  <ServiceIndication>DualRingDiameter</ServiceIndication>
  <SequenceNumber>0</SequenceNumber>
</RepositoryData>
</Sh-Data>
vdejoindn=Diameter:orclhsspublicid=user1,ou=Custom,dc=hsscontractid=2001-A57

The orclHSSServiceProfile value contains the result value for the DataReference type for the IMSPublicIdentity. The DataReference type is specified by a numeric value in the communication, however each value corresponds to a type. The result values for the DataReference type are listed in Table 20-2:

By default, Oracle Communications Universal User Profile sends the value corresponding to IMS PUBLIC IDENTITY with All-Identities SH UDR to the HSS and retrieves the complete user identity set.

If clients must send different UDR requests, an LDAP control defined as 2.16.840.1.23008.2.9.28 can be used. The data in the control takes the numeric value followed by a semicolon (;) and Reference Identifier, for example: 0;DualRingTone. The numeric value corresponds to one of the UDR values listed in Table 20-2:

The Diameter adapter supports writes and reads. When updating the data stored in orclHSServiceProfile, the data must be supplied in the following format:

<serviceIndicator>:<serviceIndicator_value>

For example: DualRingTone:30