Generic Personal Communications Support for Open Service Environments

Abstract

The vision for future telecommunications is often described by the slogan “information at any time, at any place, in any form” driven by both the society’s increasing demand for “universal connectivity” and the technological progress in the area of mobile computing and personal communications. In order to realize this vision a Personal Communications Support System (PCSS) has been developed within a project of the R & D-programme from the DeTeBerkom GmbH, a subsidiary of the Deutsche Telekom AG, by Technical University of Berlin. The PCSS is designed to support advanced personal communications capabilities, i.e. personal mobility, service personalization, and advanced service interoperability, in a uniform way to numerous communication applications in distributed multimedia inhouse environments. From a functional perspective, the PCSS provides enhanced Intelligent Network (IN) and Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT) capabilities with respect to customer addressing (based on logical names instead of numbers) and advanced customer control capabilities. From a design perspective, the centralistic IN/UPT approach to the realization of service logic has been replaced by a highly distributable, object-oriented approach based on X.500/X.700/Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) concepts. This paper presents the basic aspects of the PCSS, including design criteria, system functionality, platform design and evolution issues.KeywordsCustomer ControlFormat ConversionINMedia ConversionPCSPCSSService PersonalizationService InterworkingTMNUPTUser Mobility