Integration of commercial Internet applications in a TINA environment

Services on the Internet rely on Internet applications, that is software applications distributed between clients and an Internet server relying on IP-based communication. This work demonstrates that they can benefit from the TINA (telecommunications information networking architecture) session concept, and especially from the service session. In detail, our objective was to study both the impact on, and the applicability of the TINA standard, whenever commercial applications are reengineered as TINA services. To achieve this objective, the work described here integrates two commercial conferencing applications in a TINA compliant telecommunication framework, and it extends the applications features to support distance education and traditional conference sessions in a flexible and intuitive way. This paper describes the solution implemented by the authors by showing its overall architecture, and the internal composition of each service component. For each of them, the internal behavior is mapped on a common example scenario. Also, the paper points out the problems encountered and the results achieved, by focusing especially on the enhancements brought by the integrated TINA/Internet solution, and on the benefits added by TINA. Some topics for further work are also discussed.