The TINA Consortium

The Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture Consortium, established in 1993, has delivered architectural guidelines and sets of specifications for a common and coherent software architecture to enable the provisioning of telecommunications and information services. The article gives an overview of the structure and achievements of TINA-C so far and outlines future work items. The main concepts summarized in this article include business modeling, sessions, computing framework, distributed processing environment, service architecture, and network resource information modeling. Interworking concepts and migration strategy from existing technologies toward TINA and a short description of validation activities are delineated. The scope of the TINA-C initiative-including the provisioning of multimedia services, allowing flexibility in combining any kind of connectivity, third-party connection setup, and broadcasting, as well as multiparty involvement-can be seen as a most valuable complement to the global information infrastructure activities, providing an architectural underpinning for the global information infrastructure