@INGate: integrating telephony and Internet

This paper presents a distributed IN architecture called @INGate that allows users to access a common mailbox from both the Internet side using standard e-mail and WWW frontends and from the telephony side using fixed and mobile telephones and fax machines. The core of this new architecture is the network-bridge service node (NB-SN), a distributed intelligent network (IN) element consisting of a channel matrix switch (CMS) to connect to the PSTN/ISDN, several resource platforms (RP) containing media conversion modules (MCM) to perform the required media translations, an Internet gateway (IG) to hold the subscribers' mailboxes and provide the Internet connectivity, and a service node controller (SNC) to manage the overall service logic and the above NB-SN components. The service node itself is managed along with other nodes in a distributed IN by a TMN-compliant operation, administration and maintenance (OAM) center.