From IN toward TINA — Potential migration steps

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the basic architectural migration steps from current Intelligent Network (IN) based service platforms toward emerging Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) based service environments. This evolution can be regarded as a stepwise replacement of IN functional entities by means of a set of appropriate TINA computational objects realised on top of a Distributed Processing Environment (DPE). Hence in the course of evolution, a service platform may comprise two parts; a still IN-conformant part and an already TINA-conformant part. This raises the need for the definition of appropriate adaptation units, allowing for example an IN Service Switching Function to interwork with TINA objects implementing the service control and management logic. Whereas the upper part of the adaptation concentrates on the mapping of concrete IN Application Protocol operations onto appropriate method invocations of TINA computational objects, on the bottom this adaptation has to deal with the interworking between the Signalling System No. 7 network protocols, and inter-DPE-node protocols.