Gerd Siegmund

Flexible Universal Networks—A New Approach to Telecommunication Services?

GPRS, WLAN integration, Mobile Number Portability and UMTS are some of the new technologies which are foreseen to carry many new service applications. In the near future, it is expected that mobile networks will go beyond connecting people and will connect an increasing number of machines, appliances, consumer devices, sensors and actuators. Also, users will connect through personal area networks and the importance of user profiles and service profiles will grow. Given the current strictness of network design, those services will further increase the complexity of todays networks. The reason is established design principles, which require new, dedicated network elements for new service applications. In addition, the applications contain their own subscriber data, usually stored locally in the applications database (distributed across the network), managed from their own management systems and with their own interfaces to Subscriber Care and Accounting Systems. In current designs, databases like home location register, AAA-Servers, MMS, Number Portability and others keep a significant amount of identical data that have to be kept consistent across all applications. For Network Operators, the effort to plan, to administrate and to introduce new services in those networks increases dramatically. This paper presents a concept to simplify current and future telecommunication networks. The concept contains a number of measures that complement each other but can be implemented independently one from another. In addition, a Telco project is presented (Evolute) where some of the ideas presented in the paper have been implemented.