Integrated services engineering

Integrated services engineering (ISE) is a relatively new branch of telecommunication engineering and is associated with the cost effective creation, deployment and management of services in a heterogeneous network environment. The conceptual separation of bearer networks and user services is now well established and forms the basis of the intelligent network architecture currently being implemented by European and US Telco´s. This separation is being driven, not only by the technological need to manage complexity, but also by the deregulation and open network legislation, which is leading to a multiplicity of service and bearer network providers. In such an environment, service engineering requires a process cognisant to this changing market place. Within the EU-RACE programme, Project Line 5 addresses issues arising from the particular needs of service engineering. The basis of their work is an architectural framework that utilises the Open Distributed processing-Reference Model (ODP-RM) and encompasses the concepts of telecommunications management networks (TMN) and intelligent networks (IN)