The future vision of "information and communication anytime, anywhere, and in any form" is starting to come into focus as major players begin to position themselves for radical transformation of their network and service infrastructures. It has become increasingly clear that a prerequisite for realization of such a vision is the convergence of the current multiple networks -- each employing different transport and control technologies -- into a unified, multi-service, data-centric network offering services at different qualities and costs on open service platforms. The evolution toward such a vision is undeniably influenced by the growing trends of deregulation in the telecommunications industry on one hand, and the rapidly evolving technological convergence between distributed computing and communications (singularly embodied in the Internet and its associated technologies) on the other. In a real sense, the necessary technological and environmental underpinnings exist today for next-generation service providers to begin the process of transforming their infrastructures in ways that will enable provision of many new innovative services rapidly, economically, on a mass scale, and with the required quality of service. System, hardware, and especially software vendors will also need to revamp and retune their production processes to meet the challenges of convergence in next-generation networks (NGN).

In the interest of reducing time to market, NGN will require a clean separation of functions and domains with the maximum degree of reuse built into the architecture and its components. The general functions of transport, services, and middleware will need to exist in NGN  with clean boundaries and richer functionality. Because of the convergence of communication and distributed computing, it is becoming possible to architect a highly reliable, robust, and real-time middleware that can hide complexities of distribution from individual applications.
Following three major domains that will constitute the NGN:

• A service domain that encompasses the service-related aspects of data and logic, and provides coherent end-to-end functionality to the customer
• A transport domain that provides the connectivity requested by the service domain with the required QoS and within specified policy constraints
• A distributed processing environment (DPE) domain that provides a ubiquitous middleware infrastructure for the distributed components of the service and transport domains to communicate with each other

The two types of customers (residential and business) will have their own internal networks and devices, with gateways connecting them to the service provider's infrastructure. TNote that all four types of relationships (residence-residence, residence-business, business-residence, and business-business) need to be supported, with the service provider directly or indirectly (through third parties) supplying and supporting components of all three domains (service, transport, and DPE), as well as the application content servers, to enable NGN services on a ubiquitous unified infrastructure.

The first and perhaps most prominent class of services offered by the NGN will be interactive communications services. These include real-time communications services involving multiple parties interacting in real time and using multiple media (voice, video, and data). Multiple qualities or grades of these services will need to be supported. Services of this kind will constitute the evolution of today's voice telephony into next-generation multimedia multiparty communication. Because of their real-time performance and dynamic control requirements, these services are likely to become the most complex set of services NGN will offer its customers. Communications services also include non-real-time services involving multiple parties and multiple media. These will constitute the evolution of today's messaging (predominantly e-mail and voicemail) into a unified set of store-and-forward multimedia services that have elaborate terminal adaptability, control, and media conversion capabilities.
The second major class of services can be broadly labeled information/data services. These services may be thought of as the evolution of today's Internet services: browsing, information retrieval, online directories, scheduled information delivery, e-commerce, advertising, and other generally non-network-based services the Internet so ubiquitously and seemingly effortlessly provides (excluding e-mail, which we classified as a communications service). What will need to be preserved, however, and indeed extended to all other NGN services, is the ease of use inherent in today's Internet paradigm.
The third class of services that a next generation communications services company will inevitably need to offer and/or enable is delivery of content. Typically, such content delivery is for purposes of entertainment and/or education. We label these entertainment/education services. The NGN's service domain architecture must address these challenges and provide an efficient and economical infrastructure to support them.

Finally, there is another class of services that has to do with management of other services. These services may or may not have revenue-generating potential by themselves, but are otherwise every bit as useful and necessary as any other service. These are categorized as ancillary/management services. This class includes services such as subscription, customer provisioning, customer network management, and customer service management. The dominant mode of accessing these services is likely to be through a Web-based interface. Many services in this category typically are needed in support of other end-user services, and hence are ancillary in nature. Other services in this class include configuration management, performance monitoring and management, billing and accounting management, service security management, policy enforcement, and similar services.

Winfoware: Key Differentiators