THE INTELLIGENT NETWORK - NEW TRENDS

''Intelligent Network'' is a term which has been introduced several years ago to define an architectural concept applicable to all telecommunication networks. The objective of IN is to allow the introduction of new capabilities in the telecommunications network and to facilitate and accelerate in a cost-manner, service implementation and provisioning, in a multi-vendor environment. The goal of this paper is to describe the introduction of the Intelligent Network and to propose a new architecture based on Advanced Information Processing (AIP) techniques. After the description of the IN architecture as defined by CCITT, we provide a comparison between several architectures that are currently developped with the similar criteria: flexibility and modularity. Then we identify some AIP techniques that should be introduced to really have an ''intelligent'' network.