B-ISDN control plane solutions: comparison of the deployment properties of a message based versus an RPC based middleware

This paper addresses the implementation of the control plane architecture for the B-ISDN network. After reviewing the entities that this architecture requires, we consider two competing solutions for the middleware in charge of transferring the information between the control plane entities. The first one, which is a new proposal for a special purpose message based middleware, is specifically adapted to the B-ISDN control plane requirements and makes use of the TCAP protocol over a connectionless signaling network. We compare it to a solution consisting in using a general purpose RPC based middleware like CORBA (GIOP) over a connection oriented signaling network. We analyze the performance of both solutions and find the criterions showing the advantage of the message over TCAP solution rather than the GIOP solution