Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Service Research Articles

Personal mobility aspects in service architectures: extensions to TINA

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.

TINA – Architectural basis for future telecommunications services

Today telecommunications service provision and management is coined by international standards for Intelligent Network (IN) and Telecommunications Management Network (TMN). However, with the increasing acceptance of object-oriented software modelling techniques and Open Distributed Processing (ODP) standards, a new architecture beyond IN and TMN is gaining momentum, known as Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA). TINA is considered to be the architectural framework for the unified provision of future telecommunications and management services within a common distributed processing environment. This paper provides an overview of the basic TINA concepts with particular emphasis on the TINA service architecture, which provides the principle framework for the distributed realization of future telecommunications services.

Realizing TMN-like Management Services inTINA

Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) provides an architecture based on distributed computing technologies to enable telecommunications networks to support the flexible introduction and operation of new advanced services and to manage both the services and the network in an integrated fashion. While the service operation and management aspects are well advanced, network management aspects are less well defined. Resource Configuration Management (RCM) is one of the most important management areas as it covers, among others, the management of static topology and dynamic connectivity resources; these are both fundamental to the operation of TINA services. In this paper we present first an analysis of RCM, which results in introducing a new domain that deals with the configuration of management resources, in addition to network, service and computing resources. We then present a generic model for configuration management computational entities; this separates specific task-oriented aspects from generic resource representations accessed in a flexible fashion. The generic computational interface and relevant methodology for representing and accessing resources are influenced from OSI/TMN design principles, but make use of the TINA ODP-based Distributed Processing Environment (DPE). Based on this generic model, we present an RCM system architecture that deals with network and management resources. Parts of the latter have been verified through a prototype implementation in the context of a real field trial.

Towards integration of service and network management in TINA

The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) defines a framework to support the rapid and flexible deployment and management of a wide range of multi-media, multi-party services in a multi-vendor telecommunications environment. The TINA approach applies opendistributed processing (ODP) and object-oriented design techniques to specify the control and management of the telecommunications services and infrastructure. Management in TINA is applied to the different components of the architecture, services and resources, and to thedistributed processingenvironment (DPE) that provides distribution transparencies and communication capabilities among TINA components. Management in TINA is based on TMN and extended with ODP concepts, as TINA is not concerned with just network management, but also systems management. TINA management architecture addresses aspects of distribution, interoperability, dynamic manager/managed roles, and integration with service control functions. TINA service management concerns different activities of the service life-cycle, from four main aspects: access session management, service session management, user session management and communication session management. The TINA network resource model supports requirements from both network management activities and service connectivity needs.