NETWORK ARCHITECTURE - PRESENT AND FUTURE

Businesses and individual subscribers are gradually coming to expect more from telecommunications than simple transmission of information. A burgeoning demand has emerged for more sophisticated capabilities such as data storage and processing. At the same time, networks are in the midst of an immense structural transformation away from separate dedicated networks for voice, data, and fax traffic to an all-inclusive broadband integrated-services digital network. Once it is in place, the B-ISDN will support service provisioning capabilities that are vastly improved, both quantitatively and qualitatively. A viable network that serves as the platform to accommodate these far-reaching social and technological changes must be constructed systematically over a long period of time. Moreover, it must also be based on a robust architecture that is meticulously conceived to satisfy the diverse needs of users, carriers, and vendors alike. This paper stresses the indispensability of a well-conceived network architecture and elaborates on the current state of architecture related development. Later, the point is made that networks are really based on a multiplicity of interrelated architectures.