The Long Term Architecture Challenge

The availability of new technologies both in the network, where broadband transport facilities are being introduced, and at the customer site where data terminals are providing for more and more intelligence and presentation capabilities, offers an undetermined number of opportunities for the introduction of new telecommunication and information networking services. This becomes most evident when referring to entertainment services, spanning from video on demand to interactive multimedia games, and to personal communication services. This promising perspective is very challenging for current networks. On the one side the functionalities needed to support such services often require specialized hardware and software systems, adding heterogeneity and complexity in the network for both service provisioning and management. On the other side the opening of the telecommunication services markets makes the capability of rapidly deploying innovative services a strategic factor, thus calling for simplicity, homogeneity and modularity. These and other considerations push for the definition of an architecture for telecommunications software for both service and management applications. Since the late eighties the TINA Workshop initiative have gathered contributions of many stakeholders aiming at creating a common foundation for the development of a Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture capable of successfully coping with long term challenge. The consensus degree that has been reached on these themes is now visible when looking at the list of companies, includincg telecom operators, telecom equipment manufacturers and even computer and software manufacturers, that have become members of the TINA Consortium. The paper aims at positioning the LTA activity carried out in ITU-T SG11 WP4 with respect to ongoing international activities in the field, most notably, the TINA Consortium: it discusses a set of general but challenging technical requirements to be fulfilled in the long term and some of the emerging principles and concepts that are candidate for inclusion in the LTA.