Realizing service mobility for personal communications applications

This paper describes the issues concerning service mobility support in a distributed system which facilitates the development of distributed personal communications applications using independently-developed autonomous network servers. The authors mean by service mobility, the capability of the system to hide server interface specifics from the clients by a generic service acquisition mechanism, and to ensure the clients continued access to services despite server access failure and terminal, server and/or user mobility. The system's architecture can be mapped onto emerging and future public intelligent network architectures, such as Bellcore's Information Networking Architecture (INA) and Telecommunications INformation Networking Architecture (TINA), which is an international effort.