TINA — A Distributed Approach to Service Management

Abstract

The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium (TINA-C) was formed 5 years ago to develop an architecture to address the radical business and technological changes then envisaged in the future telecommunications world. Central to the proposed solution is an infrastructure known as the TINA distributed processing environment (DPE). The TINA service architecture, which defines a set of concepts and rules for the management of a wide range of services, is of particular interest here. This paper outlines the current status and output of the TINA Consortium and goes on to describe a collaborative implementation project which uses many of the TINA concepts and specifications to build a pan-European service platform. An important vision within TINA is that of open interfaces and interoperability in a heterogeneous environment. The extent to which this goal has been achieved is discussed in the light of experience.