Flexible universal networks - a new approach to telecommunication services

摘要

GPRS, WLAN, UMTS and Mobile Number Portability are promising to enable many new service applications. Most probably, mobile networks will connect an increasing number of machines and devices in numbers beyond people. However, with the current strictness of network design, this will drastically increase the complexity of telecommunication networks. In addition, each application tends to contain its own subscriber data, usually stored locally in the application's database and distributed across the network. The corresponding management systems are proprietary and use dedicated interfaces to customer care and accounting systems. Databases like HLR, AAA-Servers, MMS, Number Portability hold a significant amount of identical data which need to be kept consistent. Consequently, Network Operators face dramatically increased efforts to plan, to introduce and to maintain new services. This paper presents a concept to simplify telecommunication networks. The concept contains a number of measures which complement each other but can be implemented independently one from another. This concept is under investigation in the context of FLEXINET (IST-507646), a project within the EU 1ST framework program 6.