TINA - A SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES

Alcatel is a core member of TINA-C, a consortium of operators, and telecommunication and computer vendors, started in 1993 for a five year period. The object is to support rapid and flexible introduction of new services by use of distributed computing and object oriented techniques in current network architectures. A key idea is the separation between ''delivery'' and ''service'' segments, which map into a separation between ''connection'' and ''session'' management. A major enhancement of this approach is integration of management and control within each service: TMN is no more a separated part of the architecture. This article describes the proposed architecture and outlines Alcatel's interest in TINA.