Building a Next-Generation Voice Mail System

The need

One of the leading European providers of messaging and mobility solutions for the telecommunications market needed to rebuild the outdated voice mail system for the mobile carriers. In order to do that, Altoros had to add new functionality. Also, the new system had to support various programming and equipment platforms to lower the maintenance costs.

The challenges

The team had to develop a highly functional voice mail system from scratch, the previous solution could not be utilized, as it was written in C++ and the new solution had to be developed with Java.

The components (modules) had to be robust, stable and reliable, and conform to some specific telecommunications requirements, such as high availability, scalability, and dynamic configuration.

The solution

The framework was developed as part of this project. The framework served as the foundation for building working packages for the system. Altoros developed the following modules:

• The Lawful Interception adapter and SPTP protocol retrieve the related information from logical components inside the Voice Mail System and forward this information to Delivery Function.
• The SMPP protocol adapter is a flexible communication gateway for transferring SMS between the Voice Mail component Service Node and the Message Center.
• The Statistics and Reporting View Renderer was implemented for retrieving reporting data written by other modules, calculating statistics data according to the configured calculation rules, and outputting both reporting and statistics data to HTML, MS Excel, PDF, or .CSV files.
• The Media Converter transforms plain text and e-mail messages to TIFF images that are used for sending messages by fax.
• The THOR Dashboard is a set of web pages that visualizes the system condition at a glance. The dashboard uses SOAP client to retrieve data from the Statistics Renderer.

To conform to telecommunications industry standards, we offered the following solutions and approaches.

High Availability: If services or applications are not able to handle the incoming messages, they report the loss of availability to other services that can perform the same functions.

Scalability: All services have to be easily extended in case a higher level of performance or higher throughput is needed. To achieve this, all modules were implemented as stateless. It means that every module can be configured as several copies to enable concurrent processes.

Configuration: The Java Spring configuration framework was used to enable static and dynamic configuration without a need to restart the system.

The outcome

The system allowed the customer to deliver the cutting-edge solution for the mobile carriers market. The solution allowed the company to extend the range of its services and opportunities for the leading European mobile operators.