A new business role for supporting personal mobility in TINA: the terminal provider

An extension to the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) for personal mobility support is introduced. In particular, aspects deriving from the fundamental personal mobility principle which requires a user to be dynamically associated to different terminals for different services are analysed and the consequent need for defining a new role in the TINA business model is presented. Such a role corresponds to those actors which are in charge of proving/managing terminals to/for end-users and allows a separate handling of user and terminal information. The paper reflects the vision of the EC/ACTS research project DOLMEN that is developing OSAM, an open service architecture for fixed and mobile environments.