The intelligent network (IN) has coined the face of telecommunication service provision. The IN aims for service and network independence and thus represents a flexible service platform. Evolution of the IN platform should be possible by the definition of IN capability sets, which enable the incorporation of new service needs and new technologies. Today object-oriented middleware, such as CORBA, and new service architectures, such as TINA, are gaining increasing acceptance, since they promise on the one hand the necessary openness required in the telecommunications market, as well as the possibility to interwork with/integrate legacy technologies. This paper investigates the evolution of IN in face of emerging CORBA-based middleware. The idea is to adopt the OMG CORBA standard, enhancing it to make it suitable for telecom systems, in particular for the intelligent network (IN). Distributed object-oriented computing has to be introduced first in the network intelligence. In order for this to be possible, there are three main factors to be taken into account: the IN legacy systems, including the Signalling System No. 7 (SS7); the IN event/trigger computing paradigm, based on the basic call state model (BCSM); and the key nonfunctional requirements, as high performance and reliability, real-time support.
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