TINA service architecture: from specification to implementation

The VITAL project has produced an implementation of the TINA (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture) service architecture (SA), based on the SA 4.0 deliverable released by the core team (CT) in October 1996. In order to design a system based on these high level specifications, we were obliged to fill in all missing details required to actually come to an implemented system. We report on the most important design decisions we have taken in this process. The major differences between the TINA Retailer reference point specification, as defined at the time of writing this paper, and VITAL's implementation are indicated. The deployment details of the system on a distributed processing environment (DPE) platform are also detailed. Furthermore, VITAL also introduced service-specific behaviour for a number of services within the context of a teletraining application. The adopted approach for coordinating the service-common and service-specific parts of the service session is elaborated.