AT&T: The Network of the Future

AT&T is busy building out a Common Architecture for Real-Time Services (CART), its next generation network that uses IMS but is not IMS, said Siroos Afshar, Senior Technical Consultant at AT&T Labs, speaking at the VON conference in San Jose.



The goal is to decouple the company's various access networks from the services delivered to the customer, enabling any application to be easily delivered to any device. In AT&T's vision, the network retains the intelligence of current services, user preferences, device capabilities, and user availability/presence on every access network. This will require the network to maintain a database of device profiles and user preferences. Applications need only worry about their own service logic and not network status or user presence.



AT&T has developed its own Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE) based on SIP servlets that defines how application run. This includes both AT&T and non-AT&T applications. SLEE overcomes the need for deploying lots of application servers every time a need service is introduced to the network.



AT&T has written a 180-page document describing how CARTs runs over its converged IP/MPLS backbone. The document is being circulated amongst equipment suppliers under NDA.

http://www.att.com

http://www.von.com