Open Telecommunications Standards

Telcos need to integrate new products into tomorrow's intelligent networks

Rainer Mauth

A tidal wave of change is hitting the telecommunications industry: Open and modular computing technology is replacing the monolithic kernels of today's telecommunications equipment. This process is driven not only by telecommunications companies' need to develop products that integrate with the intelligent networks of tomorrow's information highway but also by increased time-to-market pressures. "Telecommunications is becoming so competitive that we can't afford to go on with our proprietary systems," says Gerhard Ott, head of marketing and systems architecture at Siemens Private Communications Systems (Munich, Germany).Traditionally, t elecommunications equipment vendors, such as Alcatel, Philips, and Siemens, built their PBXes and switches using homegrown OSes. "As our devices get more and more sophisticated, we need open, real-time OSes that are scalable and at the same time very fault tolerant," says Hans Heilborn of Ericsson in Stockholm, Sweden.

In an effort to standardize an industrywide distributed processing environment (DPE), a group of European Telecom service providers and equipment vendors has founded the Real-Time Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (ReTINA) consortium, which will specify interaction models for multimedia traffic. It will use the ISO/ITU Open Distributed Processing (ODP) reference model as a framework, and its models will be compliant with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).One possible platform for ReTINA is Chorus Systems ' (Saint-Quentin-en-Yveline, France) microkernel technology (see "The Chorus Microkernel, " January 1994 BYTE). This family of scalable, object-oriented OSes will serve as a common platform for fault-tolerant servers, PBXes, and switches, including set-top boxes and portable phones. The Chorus Nucleus/r6, the new base of Chorus Systems' real-time OS, has been developed within the STREAM research project of the European Community. However, this object-oriented technology will soon make its way into commercial products.The Santa Cruz Operation has announced that it will integrate the microkernel into its OpenSever release 5 Unix OS and target it at the telecommunications market. The first major customer of the new SCO OS, code-named MK2 and scheduled to ship in early 1997, will be Siemens Private Communications Systems.

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As Complexity Increases...

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According to Michel Gien, Chorus Systems' chief technology officer, "as the complexity in computer systems increases, you can see an ongoing separation of layers, like the division of biological cells. At the end of this decade, a standard OS, for example, will consist of special-purpose plug-in microkernels and OS servers. Telecommunications equipment will be part of this process."