To. Eckardt et al., BEYOND IN AND UPT - A PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS SUPPORT SYSTEM BASED ONTMN CONCEPTS, IEEE journal on selected areas in communications, 15(7), 1997, pp. 1308-1314
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has been replaced by a highly distributable, object-oriented approach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.