Signalling adaptors between distributed systems and telecommunication networks

Conventional telecommunication software components are mainly developed using message passing as the underlying communication mechanisms. Recent standards on modern distributed systems, exemplified by CORBA and DCE, however, have converged to a new programming paradigm based on the client/server architecture, object-oriented model, and remote procedure calls (RPCs). In the near future, we envision the coexistence of conventional and CORBA or DCE-based telecommunication software components. As a result, protocol converters between the network components using a message-oriented protocol and the ones using RPCs have become an important issue. This paper addresses how to interwork these two different communication paradigms using a signalling adaptor (SA), which is a protocol converter for enabling seamless communications between message-based systems and object-oriented, RPC-based systems.