Signaling Adaptors between Distributed Systems and Telecommunication Networks

The conventional telecommunication software components are mainly developed using message-passing as the underlying communication mechanisms. Recent standards on modern distributed systems, exemplified by CORBA and DCE, however, have converged to a new programming paradigm based on client/server architecture, objectoriented model, and Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). In the near future, we envision the coexistence of conventional and CORBA or DCE-based telecommunication software components. As a result, protocol converters between the network components using message-oriented protocol and the ones using RPCs have become an important issue. This paper addresses how to interwork these two different communication paradigms using Signalling Adaptor (SA), which is a protocol converter for enabling seamless communications between message-based systems and object-oriented, RPC-based systems.