Towards seamless control and management systems
Fabrice Dupuy · 1997
The control and management services add new value to the telecommunications networks. As these services evolve, due to various factors like an increasing network technology diversity, increasing processing capabilities at the public periphery and reglementary acts, two trends can be observed : an externalization of the intelligence and the absence of a common technical approach between the public and private control and management systems.The objectives of this paper are to give a short state of the art of the control and management systems (intelligent networks, computer-telephony integration servers, Internet) and to highlight the benefits that would be gained by interconnecting them (i.e. providing more ‘seamlessness’ and building a global information network). Once the advantages explained, the paper lists the requirements that can be anticipated on this global and seamless control and management system : fine identification of the information flows, independence of the platform providers, deployment flexibility, system reusability. In order to solve most of these requirements, the telecommunication community should now agree upon a single, generic enough, software architecture.As explained brievely in this paper, TINA proves to be a good candidate, provided that more global effort is spent on its assessment and validation.