What Are the Different Types of Telecommunications Infrastructure?

Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture (TINA) is a promising new telecommunication network architecture that is being formed.

With the advent of the information age, telecommunications business is gradually developing towards broadband, intelligence, and personalization. People have increasingly higher expectations for telecommunication services: they require more general services, easier development, management, interoperability, The underlying network and computing environment have better independence and so on. However, the existing telecommunication software architectures (such as IN, TMN) are difficult to fulfill these missions, so a new architecture is needed urgently to adapt to the era of broadband and multimedia information. In this regard, high expectations have been placed on TINA (Telecommunications Information Network Architecture).

In 1992, at the ISS'92 conference held in Japan, the civil international organization TINA Forum was officially announced. The organization is led by companies such as Bellcore, NTT and BritishTelecom, and has a group of equipment manufacturers (including communications equipment manufacturers and computer equipment manufacturers) and telecommunications business operating companies. In January 1993, the TINA Forum set up a core research group. At that time, there were 30 experts dispatched by each member unit. Today, the TINA Forum has grown to more than 40 participating units, including almost all major companies in the telecommunications industry. Researchers in the core working group usually work in the group for about a year and then return to their company. This is very helpful for the promotion of the research results of the TINA stage and the information communication between the core team and the auxiliary projects carried out in the participating companies.

The TINA Forum plans to come up with a set of architecture for the establishment, configuration and maintenance of telecommunication information services within five years (that is, by the end of 1997), and also provide some tools and a set of most commonly used business components for developing TINA business . Simply put, TINA business (including management) is built with business components. In this way, the business components provided by the TINA Forum constitute a basic set of business components on the one hand, and on the other hand, they can also provide reference templates for future TINA business developers. ^[1]

The main problem faced by current telecommunication network operators is no longer how to provide standard services, but how to organize and provide appropriate services at the right time and place. In other words, organizing and delivering the right business efficiently will be the number one issue. TINA is a worldwide forum organization co-sponsored by network operators, telecommunications and computer equipment manufacturers. Its goal is to provide a consistent and unified architecture for "open" telecommunications services to adapt to future-oriented broadband multimedia communications. And the requirements of the information superhighway era. The so-called "open" has the following meanings: TINA must not only meet the needs of traditional voice services, future interactive multimedia services, information services, operations and management services, but also provide flexibility in business operations to facilitate the creation of new services, Manage your business and network efficiently. The evolution of TINA makes full use of advanced technologies in the field of distributed computing, such as open distributed processing (ODP) and distributed communication environment (DCE), and object-oriented analysis and design ideas, thereby greatly improving the software's Interoperability, reusability of software specifications, flexibility of software configuration, and provide consistent construction principles for business and management software. The ultimate goal is to provide a unified communications software architecture ^[2]

TINA as a complete architecture is very complicated. In order to facilitate understanding and application, it is generally divided into 4 subsets.

• Network Architecture (NA): Provides a series of general concepts that describe transport networks, as well as mechanisms for establishing, modifying, and releasing network connections.

• Business Architecture (SA): To solve the problem of how to design, standardize, implement and manage telecommunication services simply and effectively, a series of reference business models and development frameworks, as well as some concepts and principles that must be followed.

• Computing Architecture (CA): Defines the modeling concepts used to describe object-oriented software in TINA systems and is responsible for solving issues related to the underlying support environment for telecommunications applications.

• Management Architecture (MA): Manages business, resources, software, and underlying support technologies in an integrated manner.

The overall architecture contains concepts and principles that apply to all substructures. They apply to the design, specification and implementation of any TINA software system. The overall architecture is obtained by extracting, abstracting and generalizing the common principles in the above 4 subsets ^[3]

TINA is an open architecture, which fully considers the requirements of the next-generation new services such as multimedia on the telecommunications network architecture, provides an abstract description of the underlying supporting network and computing environment, supports the transparency of the distribution of services and business components, and reduces The complexity caused by business interactions; at the same time, it is compatible with existing networks and services, adapts to the multi-vendor environment of equipment and services, and solves the problem that products of different manufacturers have difficulty coordinating work.

TINA provides a solution for developing telecommunication services on heterogeneous transmission networks, while maintaining the advantages of traditional network architectures such as IN and TMN. TINA has three basic characteristics: the separation of business and network, maximum manageability and controllability, distributed processing environment and the use of object-oriented technology. According to TINA, a telecommunications system consists of three domains: service, network transmission, and users (see figure). TINA's separation of telecommunications services from telecommunications network technology brings many advantages: Firstly, the business layer does not have to deal with end-to-end connection issues, nor does it need to consider the specific composition of the underlying transmission network; secondly, the separation of services and networks makes the development of the two no longer Mutual restraint.

TINA's network architecture is used to establish a variety of actual physical connections, and provides an abstract, independent of connection technology, interface to the upper-level business architecture. TINA's business architecture provides a series of primitives to establish services, and separates the access and use of services, which enhances the mobility and security of services and makes user personal information irrelevant to specific services. This also means that multiple services can be reused at a higher level (such as common access procedures such as authentication and routing queries).

TINA also defines a Subscription Management module and a Resource Configuration Management module. The contract management module is used to manage the user's contract information and business information; the resource configuration management is used to manage the network topology. TINA integrates the latest research results in the field of telecommunications and information, and proposes an architecture based on distributed computing technology. It integrates telecommunications and management services into the same architecture, and uses both object-oriented and distributed processing technologies. Introduced a layered architecture that combines control and management of the business ^[3]

Currently, work around TINA is focused on three main directions:

1. Continue to conduct theoretical research and formulate standards for TINA's architecture, gradually refine and solidify the contents of each part of TINA's architecture, and issue the final version at the end of 1997.

2. Through the development of experimental projects, some prototypes were implemented to verify the correctness of the TINA architecture.

3. Study how to integrate the existing intelligent network and telecommunication management network to evolve to the future telecommunication network TINA. In order to provide convincing evidence of the correctness, rationality, and advancedness of the TINA structure, a series of experimental projects are ongoing. There are mainly the following: (1) TINA Multimedia Auxiliary Project: undertaken by 5 companies including British Telecom and Ericsson. The goal is to test the TINA business architecture by developing a multimedia conference service. (2) ReTINA: ACTS (Advanced Communications Technology and Services) program under the European Telecommunication Union. The goal is to develop a distributed processing environment (DPE) in the practical stage. An investment of 17 million US dollars was jointly carried out by 11 European telecommunications companies including Siemens, Alcatel, British Telecom and France Telecom. (3) ACE (Application Construction Environment): undertaken by CSELT, Italy. The goal is to provide a set of practical tools for the development of TINA business, including Browser / Editor, Validation & Simulationtool, Performance evaluators, Code Generation, etc. (4) HiTOS (High Telecommunications Operating System): The task is to conduct business management experiments, which are undertaken by Korea Telecom. The project's phase results were demonstrated at the Telecom'95 conference in Switzerland. The implementation of HiTOS is divided into two layers: the business layer and the ATM network control layer. HiTOS currently supports only two services: VOD and videophone. These two services can be said to be typical services on broadband information networks. At present, HiTOS system is actually running on the multimedia service platform of Korea Telecom. (5) VITAL: undertaken by Alcatel. The overall goal is the realization of a complete TINA architecture. It is important to demonstrate and verify the development, application, and management of complex and diverse business attributes. (6) PersonalCommunicationSupportinTINA-C: This is a newly launched TINA auxiliary project, undertaken by Deutsche Telekom. The goal is to further integrate personal communication services into the TINA architecture ^[1] .