ROS-to-CORBA mappings: First step towards intelligent networking using CORBA

Abstract

The key to introducing CORBA-based object-oriented technologies in the real-time telecommunications signalling environment is to ensure interoperability by maintaining the existing, standard protocols using Signalling System No. 7 for the external communication interface between telecommunication equipment. Signalling applications such as Intelligent Networks (EST) are defined as Remote Operations Service (ROS) Application Service Elements (ASE). As shown in this paper, the first step to applying CORBA technology in the IN domain appears to be the ability to map the principal concepts of ROS, and the corresponding Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN. 1) information object classes that define them, to the corresponding CORBA concept and IDL-based constructs. Needless to say, the concepts of ROS and CORBA are mostly complementary but not necessarily always fully aligned. In the course of this work, it has been necessary to make use of constructs defined by the computational model of TINA-C which has adopted and expanded upon CORBA IDL. As the ROS concepts are more fully exploited by data services defined by the X.400-based Messaging and X.500-based Directory standards, the techniques described in this paper can also aid the interworking of existing implementations of these services with CORBA-based implementations.