VHE - Virtual home everywhere - towards a totally integrated fixed/mobile VHE open S standardised interface

Abstract

This article consists of a collection of slides from the author's PowerPoint conference presentation. Nowadays three main trends driving tcleeommunications into the next millennium can be identified: third generation of mobile communications (UMTS), the impact of the l~ternet and service continuity. UMTS is seen as the enabler of wireless multimedia applications, overall (fixed-mobile, public-private, voice-data) convergence and the portability of a personalised service set across network and terminal boundaries, as defined in the Virtual Home Environment (VHE) system concept. Currently work is ongoing in different standardisation bodies (e.g. ETSI, 3GPP, ITU-T) and consortia (e.g. TINA-C, Parlay, OMG) allowing third parties to exploit the network service capability features. By standardising so called 'service building blocks'· further referred to as service capability features and not the services themselves, the foundation for a very flexible intelligent service development/deployment environment is created. In the light of these recent developments, this paper investigates the enhancement of the current network centnc approach towards a real system approach, incorporating also the terminal service capability features.