The lntelliaent Network in France IN is a key element of France Telecom's network, but major technical issues must be solved to ensure IN'S successful evolution.
Patrice Collet, R. Kung · 1992
he Intelligent Network is consid- ered by France Telecom as one of the key elements of its network for meeting the increasing demand of new services. The well-known rationale for introducing IN includes: Easier introduction or modification of services, as IN pro- vides service-independent interfaces; lower costs, as IN providesvendor- and network-independent interfaces; enhanced f eatures such as cus- tomization. The longer-term evolution of the IN architecture also is of prime importance to France Telecom. For instance, IN may be applied for other types of network than the PSTN, such as broadband ISDN, and mobile, data, and private networks. Operation systems also need to be taken into account so that new IN-supported services may be easily handled by operation applica- tions (e.g., billing, maintenance, and observa- tion). Finally, outstanding issues to be solved remain (e.g., service interaction or data con- sistency). The first part of this paper describes France Tele- com's IN and how it is being introduced. The sec- ond part addresses two main technical issues of the present IN architecture-the programminginter- face to be used for service creation, and the con- trol-resource interface such as the SSP/SCP interface. The third part highlights some of France Tele- com's views on the longer-term evolution of IN, toward a more global architecture, the Telecom- munication Information Networking Architecture (TINA).