Modeling Service Activation in a Multimedia Environment

The emergence of multimedia applications requires appropriate management and control activities to be provided and organized in an integrated framework. This paper presents an architectural approach for the modeling of service activation processing in a multimedia environment. In particular, activation processes complying with this model provide the user with the capability of devising, creating and controlling the required composite multimedia service by using elementary services provided by the network as building blocks. The model introduced reflects the distinction between requirements at the user level and requirements at the network level. Also, according to the current trends in service deployment engineering for intelligent networks, it uses the object-oriented approach in defining the classes of information to be managed. By way of illustration, in this paper we address a scenario in which cooperative multimedia services can be provided through a distributed user/network interface.