ROSA. The European Community's open service architecture

The demand for more complex services from users in both the business and residential community is creating concern in the telecommunications market. The current method of service provision using intelligent network concepts provides an architecture that is dependent on today's technology. Consequently any change in the technology in future, such as an integrated broadband communications network, may require extensive changes to the service architecture. Any architecture to support future services should be open, allowing for third party service provision, rapid service introduction, flexible service evolution and independence from network technology. ROSA (RACE Open Services Architecture) has taken the work in the field of open distributed processing from the computer industry and applied it to the telecommunications area. ROSA defines an architecture for rapid, easy provision of services in an integrated broadband communications environment by adopting a top-down generalised approach. ROSA is supported by the major European telecommunications operators who believe that a more flexible approach to service provision and management will be required in the future.