Reasons for the question

The Global Communications Environment provides an opportunity for the definition of new, enhanced services requiring support from the Intelligent Network. These services may cross several different networks (e.g. traditional wireless, traditional wireline, IP-based wireless/wireline, etc.) and thus require additional features/capabilities that represent new requirements to be defined for the Intelligent Network Application Protocol (INAP).

New, Traditional and Non-Traditional Telecommunications Service Providers are entering the marketplace and they will represent new requirements to support new and evolving services that will need to interact with the INAP.

As these new services and capabilities are defined, new protocols will be required to provide the capabilities to deploy these services. Further, with the multiplicity of new services and the variations of these services based on the networks providing them, robust service/service feature interaction control mechanisms will need development to allow existing and new INAP features/capabilities to properly interact, thus insuring end-to-end service operation.

Therefore, new recommendations providing enhancements, and new capabilities, to the Intelligent Network Applications Protocol (INAP) are required.

Question

What enhancements, and new capabilities to existing INAP Recommendations, or what new INAP Recommendations are required to support the new and evolving services defined within the context of the Global Communications Environment discussed above?

Task objectives

1) Develop INAP extensions to accommodate new framework information to support new value added, Internet based and IN-based services identified in Question A.

Estimated completion: 4Q2001.

2) Develop INAP extensions for H.323 support, available in IN CS-4.

Estimated completion: 4Q2002.

3) Develop INAP extensions for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) support, available in IN CS-4.

Estimated completion: 4Q2002.

4) Develop INAP extensions for Virtual Home Environment (VHE) support as identified in Requirements Question G, available in IN CS-4.

Estimated completion: 4Q2002.

5) Develop INAP extensions for Mobility Management support as identified in Requirements Question F, available in IN CS-4.

Estimated completion: 4Q2002.

6) Act as the coordination point for any service specific protocol requirements originating from questions developing Recommendations for ISDN, B-ISDN, IP-based signalling support and IMT-2000.

Estimated completion: Ongoing.

7) Provide input to other questions considering interaction between INAP and other signalling protocols.

Estimated completion: Ongoing.

8) Produce the necessary information for Protocol Implementation Conformance Statements (PICS) with the support of the testing question (Question P), if required. To assist the test generation the extensive usage of formal description techniques (e.g. SDL, ASN.1) is encouraged.

Estimated completion: Ongoing.

NOTE - Task completion dates are in accordance with the respective requirements task completion dates.

Relationships

The tasks of this question are related to the specification of Control Plane protocols that support or use IN principles with various communications networks. The activities leading to the successful completion of these tasks require interactions with ITU-T Study Groups developing control plane protocols, the IETF working groups, e.g. PINT, and SPIRITS (and others to be identified in the IETF work processes). Specification in this area is related also to ITU-T efforts with ITU-T H-series Recommendations, e.g. H.323, H.246, and H.248.