The infrastructure model of workstations in IBCNs: Mass market and international standardization

Abstract

For workstations in Integrated Broadband Communications Networks (IBCNs), their drastically diversified functionalities, as well as the mass of (formal and market-based) standards regulating the interfaces between these, will determine considerable structural commonalities of their implementation designs - giving rise to the concept of “internal infrastructure” of IBCN workstations. The drastically enlarged communities of users of such workstations, as well as their much higher degrees of business system orientation, will determine considerable structural commonalities of their usage designs - giving rise for the concept of “external infrastructure” of IBCN workstations. Due to the large measure of distributed applications orientation of these workstations, the substance of both these infrastructures gives rise to the concept of “generic applications of advanced communications”. In other words: The diversified functionalities and their coverage by formal and informal standards on the one side, and on the other side the huge and totally business-oriented future user communities, imply a certain “Infrastructure Model” for workstations in IBCNs. An important feature of this Infrastructure Model is its clear exposure of the generic advanced communications applications within the future workstation design, The presentation of this Infrastructure Model - today probably the only holistic model for advanced communications based and distributed applications/usage oriented workstations - is the main purpose of this paper. To this end, this report introduces and discusses the two concepts of internal and external infrastructures as well as the hierarchies within and the relations between them. In this part it also presents the consequences of far-reaching distributed applications orientation for these infrastructures of future IBCN business systems, namely their basic support for distributed applications/usage, i.e. the additional concept of “generic applications of advanced communications”, alias “generic distributed applications (GDAs)”. Separate backup papers to this report will also outline how the Infrastructure Model and the BERKOM Reference Model compliment each other and also how the contents of the Infrastructure Model is being elaborated on by currently running and planned projects in the present RACE/ESPRIT-programs and in the CEC's follow-up IT programs. There another main objective would be to show the interrelation between the Infrastructure Model and the EDISAM, the “Electronic Data Interchange Security Application Model”. Finally, they describe the BERKAPS & DIDAMES-projects, within which a pilot IBCN workstation (more precisely: an IBCN hardware/ soft/ware add-on for today's DOS-/UNIX-workstations) is being built and expanded such as to comply with this Infrastructure Model and the EDISAM - as far as this is possible today.