Issues in Realising the Tina Network Resource Architecture

TINA aims to provide an architecture based on distributed computing technologies that will enable telecommunications networks to support the flexible introduction and control of new advanced services. The provided services and the supporting network and computing infrastructure will be managed in an integrated fashion. Network management aspects in TINA are addressed by its Network Resource Architecture (NRA), which has so far concentrated on Connection and Configuration management, with Fault, Accounting and Performance management aspects to follow. VITAL is a European collaborative research project aiming to validate a long-term telecommunication architecture based on TINA, through the design, realisation and trials of a largescale system. This paper presents the VITAL work related to the realisation of the network resource architecture in the areas of resource configuration and connection management. The problems and issues encountered are highlighted and the architectural solutions adopted are presented, together with examples of operation that illustrate better the design choices for the realisation of the TINA-based NRA system.