BEYOND IN AND UPT - A PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS SUPPORT SYSTEM BASED ONTMN CONCEPTS

The vision for future telecommunications is often described by the slo gan ''information at arty time, at any place, in any form,'' driven by both society's increasing demand for ''universal connectivity'' and t he technological progress in the area of mobile computing and personal communications, In order to realize this vision, the emerging concept of personal communications support (PCS), which includes support for personal mobility, service personalization, and advanced service inter operability, is becoming increasingly important since it allows users to configure their communications environment in accordance with their individual needs, thereby providing them with controlled access to te lecommunication services, regardless of their current location, termin al and network capabilities, This paper provides an overview of a pers onal communications support system (PCSS), The PCSS represents a platf orm providing advanced PCS capabilities in a uniform way to numerous c ommunication applications in distributed multimedia environments, From a functional perspective, the PCSS provides enhanced intelligent netw ork (IN) and universal personal telecommunication (UPT) capabilities w ith respect to user addressing (based on logical names instead of numb ers) and advanced user control capabilities, From a design perspective , the centralistic IN/UPT approach to the realization of service logic has been replaced by a highly distributable, object-oriented approach based on X.500/X.700/telecommunications management network (TMN) conc epts, This paper addresses the basic aspects of the PCSS, including de sign criteria, system architecture, supported applications, and evolut ion issues.