Development of a prototype based on TINA accounting management architecture

Concepts and principles of TINA (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture) are introduced with the objective of correcting problems of centralized service control and service data model existent in INs (intelligent networks). Now, it is becoming clear that future sophisticated services breaking away from the simple telephony call model, e.g., multimedia, multi-party conferencing, etc., will need to be rapidly and efficiently introduced, deployed, operated and managed. In this context, TINA developed a comprehensive architecture for multi-service networks that will support multimedia services. On the other hand, the provisioning of all the service management functionality for TINA services (i.e. FCAPS) is still an open research question. In this paper, we discuss accounting features and requirements, security of accounting management, and issues for their integration in a TINA-based service environment. A prototype has been implemented to validate the concepts and results are also presented.