The CAMOUFLAGE project-introduction of TINA into telecommunication legacy systems

The CAMOUFLAGE Project is a national German research initiative led by the Deutsche Telekom. It aims at the provision of a TINA conforming distributed processing environment based on existing legacy telecommunication systems. The envisaged target architecture is a switched ATM network deploying B-ISDN. Using an integrative approach, a mutual stimulation between the TINA technology and the B-ISDN technology is expected. The paper presents the overall design of the CAMOUFLAGE DPE, the CMA for the B-ISDN and gives a detailed description of the B-ISDN based transport network for operational interactions. A general mechanism for the introduction of different interoperability protocols (Open Communication Interface) to CORBA is proposed. The B-ISDN protocol GFP has been selected as the foundation for the implementation for such an interoperability protocol. It allows not only a fast inter-ORB communication, but can also-due to its different modes-be tailored to the actual needs (speed, quality, amount of data). Within the scope of the transport network, a connectivity management system (CyM) based on the TINA NRA has been developed for a B-ISDN environment. Due to the fact that B-ISDN does already contain parts of the functionality required by the NRA, CyM is a subset of NRA, extended by additional objects to control the protocol stacks and the hardware. Different scenarios for the introduction of CyM have been specified, requiring only simple or no extensions to the existing B-ISDN networks.