Towards a generic service control and signalling

Considerable work has been spent on defining and characterizing the services and applications that could be offered on broadband networks. They include both well-known services that are offered by today's networks, such as telephony, and more advanced services, such as multimedia retrieval, that can only be offered through new broadband networks. The authors consider the new role the telecommunications network will play in the future. This new charter will influence attitudes toward service provisioning, service control, and signaling. They analyze the different classes of services known at present and try to extract the requirements with respect to service control and signaling. It is argued that a more innovative approach to the problem may be beneficial for service provisioning in the future. Key issues are the programmability of the network and the generic nature of the service control.<>