A TINA/IN platform for framework-based service creation

The specification of the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) has reached a stable state. TINA defines a novel and attractive way of building telecom applications. However, TINA on its own is unlikely to achieve wide market acceptance as, to a great extent, it neglects the existing telecom infrastructure. To take full advantage of the TINA Service Architecture it is necessary to find an effective way of reusing existing and emerging network capabilities. To this end, the Intelligent Networks (IN) platform can provide a well defined, high level interface to the existing fixed and mobile networks. The ACTS Project TOSCA proposes a novel approach that facilitates rapid service creation from object-oriented software frameworks [1,2]. The applicability of the 1 TOSCA TINA Open Service Creation Architecture is the ACTS project AC237. The TOSCA Consortium includes the following partners: Teltec DCU and IONA Technologies Ltd. from Ireland, BT Plc, Ericsson Ltd. and University of Strathclyde from UK, GMD Fokus from Germany, Telelogic AB and Lund Institute of Technology from Sweden, and CSELT from Italy. TOSCA approach for TINA-based multiparty multimedia services has been proven through a number of industry-scale trials involving leading European network operators. Additionally, TOSCA has verified the proposed service creation approach in a heterogeneous TINA/IN platform. Since no TINA/IN products were commercially available, the project developed a simulated model that combines the Access and Service Sessions of TINA with the connection control of IN. The scenario considered by TOSCA assumes that the service logic is invoked and executed in the TINA domain whereas IN is used mainly for establishing the speech/video connections between the participants of a service session. The role of IN is thus reduced to a high-level interface to a switched network. This scenario is of great importance for Internet-initiated telephony services such as Click-to-Dial as well as for multiparty services such as video conference type services run over B-ISDN. To create a simulated TINA/IN platform, TOSCA re-used the TINA Access and Service Session framework created by the project itself [3] and integrated it with the executable model of an IN CS2 infrastructure provided by the INAP Wrapper application [4]. Both models are designed in SDL and use Java to implement the user interfaces. Using these two languages as well as the Telelogic Tau toolset enabled the quick and effective integration of the models. The simulated TINA Service Session components USM and SSM communicate with a simulated IN SCP via a TINA/IN Gateway. This gateway processes the high-level TINA communication session messages and maps them to Parlay [5] operations. The required subset of the Parlay interface is implemented in the SCF of the IN model. Also specified in SDL, the gateway was integrated with the TINA and IN SDL models. The paper briefly outlines the principles of the framework-based approach to service creation developed by TOSCA. The focus will be given to the discussion of the architecture of the simulated TINA/IN platform and the technical aspects of the Gateway implementation. Finally, some examples of services running on the platform are presented and potential applications of the approach for Internet-initiated IN services are discussed. The presentation of the paper will be complemented with a lifedemo of the simulated TINA/IN platform and services.