FORCES Project Workshop
February 1999
| Time | Topic | Chair | Secretary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19.00 | Project Management Committee | Ken Turner, Stirling | Muffy Calder, Glasgow |
| 20.00 | Close | ||
| Time | Topic | Chair | Secretary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09.00 | Service Migration | Dave Marples, CITEL | John Bates, Cambridge |
| Services are increasingly migrating to the edge of the network. With increased competition, companies are using technology to differentiate themselves from the competition, so the requirements of electronic systems are increasingly bespoke. Nowhere is this more apparent that in communications systems as vendors move functionality away from highly available, resilient, fault tolerant but difficult to modify environments of switching systems proper to devices on the periphery which are both more accessible and easier to configure. One inevitable consequence of this migration of functionality is the possibility of conflict between the requirements of the switching system proper and the edge devices connected to it. The topic will discuss this migration, the requirements it generates and the implications it has for today's and tomorrow's switching systems. The intended outputs are suitable questions for research teams to make the distributed communications systems of tomorrow possible. | |||
| 10.30 | Tea/Coffee | ||
| 10.45 | Billing | Rob Booth, BT | Muffy Calder, Glasgow |
|
Deregulation may require a network provider to bill a separate service
provider, or indeed another network provider. It is important that this can
be performed in near real-time. This topic will explore the issues
involved.
What's in a Service? A service can be divided into two components. The core service provides users with the ability to communicate using media which meets their requirements. The service surround provides the operator and user with the capability to manage the service and ultimately exchange payment. The telecommunications market is now developing so that basic communications services are becoming ubiquitous with operators differentiating their services through innovative features in the service surround. What are the implications of these trends for the service engineering discipline? Should we consider a service to be everything needed to manage and bill for the capability to communicate? Should service creation now focus more on the areas where rapid innovation is required such as billing and tailoring services for specific markets? | |||
| 12.15 | Lunch | ||
| 13.30 | Middleware and CORBA | Gordon Blair and Geoff Coulson, Lancaster | Ken Turner, Stirling |
| This will take the form of a debate, with Gordon Blair and Geoff Coulson leading the arguments for and against. | |||
| 15.00 | Tea/Coffee | ||
| 15.15 | TINA | John Evans, Marconi Communications | Evan Magill, Strathclyde |
| The TINA consortium has reinvented itself during 1998. With the wind-down of the TINA-C core team of researchers, TINA-C now has a new modus operandi. The consortium is increasingly exploitation-oriented. However the methodology of the new consortium gives academics greater opportunities for involvement. With the TINA-C results seeping through to standards bodies, commercial organisations are starting to commercially exploit the early versions of the TINA-C architectures. Will TINA conformance testing be required in the future? | |||
| 16.45 | Concluding Remarks | Evan Magill, Strathclyde | |
| 17.00 | Close | ||
Up one level to FORCES Project Activities
URL: https://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/research/forces/activ/ws99902.html