TINA: Evolving the TMN

The telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium (TINA-C) started in 1993 with the purpose of de® ning a distributed software architecture for the new multimedia services that will be offered on the emerging broadband and mobile telecommunication networks. The consortium was initiated for the purpose of integrating concepts and standards from both the computing and the telecommunications domains. Taken into account were ODP, IN, B-ISDN, TMN, and CORBA. By the end of 1997, TINA-C expects to conclude the activities of its core team (a team of 40 researchers from 50 companies) by delivering a set of correlated speci® cations of the reference points of the TINA-C architecture. During its lifetime, as the architecture matured, the TINA concept has acquired increased interest and various ® eld-trials have contributed to validate its speci® cations. There are also periodical workshops and conferences which serve to discuss and identify the progress in the evolution towards TINA. The last one, TINA’ 97, was held at Santiago de Chile in November 1997. The application of the TINA-C architecture varies from the deployment and provision of new multimedia and multi-party services to the provision of management of IP networks. Key motivation is competitive costs in a multi-vendor environment. And since the cost of management of services and systems tends to increase exponentially (e.g., the shortcoming of the Internet to maintain quality of service due to its `unmanageability’ ) with the size of the network, the TINA-C architecture poses strong requirements on the integration of applications and systems with their management. Management aspects are considered central to the development of TINA. This special issue focuses on the identi® cation of these requirements and the solutions proposed by TINA. It comes at a time where major trends are visible in the development of distributed platforms to provide scaleable solution for management applications. The Telecom