Stored program controlled telecommunication services

The author highlights some basic concepts developed under the Research and Development in Advanced Communications Technologies in Europe program that could be instrumental in providing future stored-program-controlled telecommunication services. The necessity of defining the instruction set for the stored program-controlled general-purpose telecommunication system is pointed out. The instruction set will allow a program to be written for each user service. Declarative (object-oriented) and functional (procedure- or operation-oriented) building blocks have been identified as service components and service control elements respectively. A further breakdown of both categories has been indicated. The possibility of creating user service definitions in a standardized and structured way concerns the process of creating an instance of a generic user service definition to yield the actual user service definition