Personal mobility aspects in service architectures: extensions to TINA

Abstract

Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) is a proposal elaborated in the period 1993–97 by major corporate organisations worldwide, in the fields of both telecommunications and information technology, towards standardisation of software interfaces and components for control and management of telecommunications services. Among these, particular relevance is played by personal mobility applications that should provide users with the capability to access services from any terminal in any place. However, full support of personal mobility requires enhancements to the TINA concepts and models. In this paper, an approach is presented towards full incorporation, in TINA, of personal mobility requirements laid down in the ITU-T UPT standards. Specifically, we discuss how personal mobility requirements can be reflected on the TINA Business Model and the TINA Service Architecture. In particular, a new business role and the concept of “Retailer Federation” are presented as the means to obtain ubiquitous worldwide service provisioning to roaming users in a multi-provider environment.