The OSA API and Other Related Issues
R. M. Stretch · Institution of Engineering and Technology eBooks · 2001
3GPP was conceived some two to three years ago with the express purpose of accelerating work on mobility. Existing standards organisations such as the ITU-T and ETSI had been successful in producing a vast array of international standards for different technologies; however, the speed with which this was attained was slow, especially when compared to bodies such as the IETF. It therefore remained a target of the mobile industry to produce coherent specifications in a time frame that was ahead of those within the standards industry - hence the formation of 3GPP. At the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999 3GPP formed a group known as OSA, Open Service Access. The purpose of this group was to focus 3GPP's efforts on defining an architecture in support of the virtual home environment (VHE) - the need here being to provide mobile users with access to their service offerings irrespective of their position within or outside the home network environment.