Nilo Mitra

Design of the CORBA/TC Inter-working Gateway

The interfaces necessary to build a gateway between a CORBA-based TC-User, such as an IN Service Control Point, and a legacy TC-User, such as a IN-capable Service Switching Point, have recently been standardized by the Object Management Group. The adoption of distributed object technologies such as CORBA on the server side together with the need to maintain the standardized messaging interfaces to legacy systems will make such gateways an essential component of any signaling architecture. The joint submission team which proposed the adopted technology were confronted with many design decisions in designing the interfaces, not all of which are obvious or fully documented. Also, the interplay between the interfaces are often subtle and involved. This paper is a tutorial on the design of the CORBA/TC interworking gateway based on the adopted submission, and highlights the choices that were made in defining the standard. It is hoped that this will make the adopted specifications more accessible.