Accounting management based service environment in a TINA architecture

The TINA (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture) concepts and principles are introduced with the objective to remedy problems of centralized service control and service data model existing in the IN (intelligent network). Now, it is becoming clear that future sophisticated services breaking away from the simple telephony call model, e.g., multimedia, multi-party conferencing, etc., will need to be rapidly and efficiently introduced, deployed, shared, operated and managed. In this context, TINA developed a comprehensive architecture for multi-service networks that shall enable multimedia communications and give access to information for business and private consumers. On the other hand, the provisioning of all management context instrumentation for TINA services (i.e. FCAPS service management functions) is still an open research question. In this paper, we discuss accounting features and requirements, security of accounting management, and issues for their integration in a TINA-based service environment. A prototype has been implemented to validate the concept and the results are also presented. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the TINA business model and to have at least a high-level overview of the TINA service and network resource architecture concepts