George Pavlou
University College London, UK

David Griffin
FORTH-ICS, Crete, Greece

Over the last few years, the increasing complexity and sophistication of telecommunication network infrastructures has led to the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) [M3010] as the framework for their management. At the very same time, the need for sophisticated services based on the telephony call-model, such as Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT), free-phone, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), etc. has led to the Intelligent Network (IN) framework [Q1200] in order to achieve their rapid introduction and operation. In the future, more sophisticated services breaking away from the simple call model, e.g. multi-media, multi-party conferencing etc., will need to be rapidly and efficiently introduced, deployed, operated and managed. Long term service architectures such as the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) [TINA] try to provide frameworks to make this possible.

Such service architectures address only the long term integration of the service creation, execution and management infrastructure. In the mean time, the traditional IN evolution is continuing while TMN systems have started being deployed. They both constitute substantial investment which cannot be neglected. In fact, new integrated architectures should provide for a smooth migration. What has certainly become clear is that the IN, sometimes also referred to as Advanced IN (AIN), adopts a functional, centralised approach while distributed object-oriented approaches would be more suitable. The modernisation of IN and its extension to support future sophisticated services is an important issue and this has led to the exploration of target integrated architectures. On the other hand, TMN principles should be used to manage the IN and, as TMN has a distributed object-oriented nature, there is the possibility of using TMN principles to realise IN services.

This paper considers the issues behind IN and TMN co-existence and integration and the evolution to target service architectures in the long term. As IN operates in the control while TMN in the management plane, this distinction is sometimes confused and the terms control and management are used in the wrong context. Here, similarities and differences between operation in the control and management planes are examined in detail while the current IN and TMN architectures are contrasted. The use of the TMN to manage the IN infrastructure in the medium term is considered while the possibility of using TMN object-oriented distributed principles to replace the IN by operating also in the control plane are discussed. The latter points to an eventual integration in a unifying framework using common underlying mechanisms e.g.a supporting Distributed Processing Environment (DPE) and bridging the gap between the computing and telecommunications worlds. The role of supporting technologies in this integration i.e. OSI Management / Directory [X701] [X500] and ODP / Object Management Group (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [X900] [CORBA] are considered.

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