FOCS – A Toolkit For Flexible Telecommunication Systems

One peculiarity of todays telecommunication systems is their tremendous heterogeneity which is mainly owed to their historical, evolutionary development and perpetual introduction of new devices and technologies. This makes it hard for a programmer / system designer to integrate many (sub-) systems into one application and to provide “flexible services”1 . In this paper we will emphasize the necessity for a new telecommunication application framework that allows to integrate many different services and provides these applications with a mechanism allowing late / dynamic (re-) configuration. FOCS2 is a recently started project that examines the applicability of object oriented design and implementation methods in the field of telecommunications. As many service providers offer equivalent3 services, it seams reasonable to introduce service abstractions and to design applications in a way that makes it possible to reference these service abstractions instead of the actual service providers.