Open Services Access

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The Open Service Access or OSA is part of the third generation mobile telecommunications network or UMTS. OSA describes how services are designed in a UMTS network.

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. Developed and maintained by the 3GPP, UMTS is a component of the International Telecommunications Union IMT-2000 standard set and compares with the CDMA2000 standard set for networks based on the competing cdmaOne technology. UMTS uses wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio access technology to offer greater spectral efficiency and bandwidth to mobile network operators.

In the contexts of software architecture, service-orientation and service-oriented architecture, the term service refers to a software functionality or a set of software functionalities with a purpose that different clients can reuse for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage.

The standards for OSA are being developed as part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The standards for OSA are published by ETSI and 3GPP.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a standards organization which develops protocols for mobile telephony. Its best known work is the development and maintenance of:

ETSI nonprofit european standards organization

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry in Europe, headquartered in Sophia-Antipolis, France, with worldwide projection. ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.

The API for OSA is called Parlay, (or Parlay/OSA or OSA/Parlay) as the APIs are developed jointly in collaboration by 3GPP, ETSI, and the Parlay Group. These APIs can be freely downloaded from the web. Sometimes OSA would be misspelled as Open Services Architecture or even confused with Open systems architecture.

Parlay X was a set of standard Web service APIs for the telephone network. It is defunct and now replaced by OneAPI, which is the current valid standard from the GSM association for Telecom third party API.

Open systems architecture, in telecommunication, is a standard that describes the layered hierarchical structure, configuration, or model of a communications or distributed data processing system that:

See also

'Parlay/OSA' was an open API for the telephone network. It was developed by The Parlay Group, which worked closely with ETSI and 3GPP, which all co-publish it. Within 3GPP, Parlay is part of Open Services Access.

The IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services. Historically, mobile phones have provided voice call services over a circuit-switched-style network, rather than strictly over an IP packet-switched network. Alternative methods of delivering voice (VoIP) or other multimedia services have become available on smartphones, but they have not become standardized across the industry. IMS is an architectural framework to provide such standardization.

In software engineering, multitier architecture or multilayered architecture is a client–server architecture in which presentation, application processing, and data management functions are physically separated. The most widespread use of multitier architecture is the three-tier architecture.


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