P608 TINA Concepts for third Generation Mobile Systems

Rationale
The TINA consortium intends to cover the broad spectrum of the complete telecom factory. This includes network control and network management, and services and service management. However, due to limitations in resources some interesting areas cannot be covered by the TINA core team. One of these areas is the support of terminal mobility. However, because of the increasing importance of mobile communications, it is essential for the success of TINA that terminal mobility is considered.

Though the TINA consortium has not studied terminal mobility yet, TINA concepts provide clues for the support of terminal mobility. The location transparency for software components provided by the Distributed Processing Environment (DPE), has parallels with the location transparency of terminal mobility. Though the use of the DPE could provide interesting possibilities for terminal mobility, the consequences of terminal mobility on the DPE still have to be studied. Another important aspect of terminal mobility is handover. This concept should be integrated with the TINA service architecture and connection management concepts.

The UMTS specifications in ETSI and ITU-T groups until now mainly cover network aspects like call handling, handover and location registration. Less attention has been given to the integration of the network control processes with other processes, such as service management, network management, and administrative processes. Study items like user profile instantiation and maintenance, subscriber administration management, fault management, accounting and billing have been identified, but many solutions still have to be found.

One of the goals of TINA is to improve the interoperability of the above processes with network control processes. Therefore, it is useful to investigate the potential advantages of applying TINA principles in UMTS service management, network management and administrative processes.

Summarising: a study on the relation between TINA concepts and mobile communications can provide benefits both to the TINA consortium - how should terminal mobility be taken into account? - and to UMTS standardisation in ETSI SMG5 and ITU-T - how can TINA concepts be used in UMTS?

Objectives
The main objectives of this Project are to:

• investigate how UMTS can benefit from TINA principles in the areas of service and network management and administrative processes and to support the realisation of UMTS standards in these areas based on TINA principles
• specify how terminal mobility and handover can be taken into account in TINA specifications for DPE and connection management

Participants BT DT FT IT NL NT ST TF TI

Duration - Project start: Aug 96 - Project completion: Apr 98

Results For Full Publication - None

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