Network integration consultation environment (NICE)

It is an important issue in Network Integration to combine various network elements such as new technologies, devices, services, and tariff systems. To cope with this issue, it is vital to manage various network elements in an integrated manner, to customize network elements according to the user requirements, and to produce a user-customized system. In this paper, a framework called Network Integration Consultation Environment (NICE) is proposed in order to support the cycle from user requirement identification to system design. In the Service aspect of NICE (S-NICE), the identification and analysis of user requirements, service specification generation, and several examples including realtime communication and store-and-forward service are described. In the Network aspect of NICE (N-NICE), an example of a private-network-design support system using knowledge processing and total network design from application analysis are presented