Abstract

From a user’s perspective, today’s networks have come a long way in fulfilling their purpose of enabling people and their machines to communicate at a distance.This focus is lacking today, with most of the attention on specific NGN technology issues.Architecture will help crystallize the requirements for each of the other NGN technology issues, as well as identify areas where industry cooperation is needed.

1.Why are NGNs important for service providers? - Public network carriers should (and
must) pursue NGNs to offer value-added services. This will be their new strategic differentiator!

2.What are the most important trends, characteristics, and specific services in an NGN environment? – Although it is difficult to predict what the next killer applications will be,this paper lists service characteristics and capabilities that will be important in the NGN environment based on service-related industry trends.

3.What attributes should a Next Generation Service Architecture possess? - One of the
primary goals of NGNs is to provide a common, unified, and flexible service architecture
that can support multiple types of services and management applications over multiple
types of transport. This paper described three critical attributes of this Next Generation
Service Architecture (i.e., architectural layering, an open services interface/API, and
distributed network intelligence).