Design and implementation of the MESH services platform

Industry acceptance of TINA (telecommunications information networking architecture) will depend heavily on both the evaluation of working systems that implement this architecture, and on the experiences obtained during the design and implementation of these systems. During the MESH (Multimedia services on the Electronic Super Highway) project, a TINA-based platform for networked multimedia services has been developed and evaluated. This platform, referred to as the MESH platform, implements major parts of the TINA service architecture version 5.0 and the TINA network architecture version 3.0. In addition, several demonstration services such as multiparty high-quality audioconferencing and videoconferencing, shared database access and subscription management services have been created. To support the design and implementation of the MESH platform a DSC (distributed software component) framework has been developed. This framework is a generalization and implementation of the TINA computational object model and can also be applied outside the TINA domain. The DSC framework acts as a middleware layer, which shields component designers from many communication level details. A DSC can be mapped to a computational object or object group. DSC can be grouped to form compound components from sub-components that also can consist of multiple components, etc. In addition, the DSC framework addresses flexible configuration, dynamic component construction from (downloadable) sub-components, and dynamic interface instantiation. The MESH platform not only demonstrates the potential of TINA, but also reveals several weak areas. This paper describes the DSC approach, which we used to design and implement major parts of TINA, and our experiences with TINA.