Support for cooperation and coherence in an open service environment

The authors describe an open services environment which will evolve on top of future communication systems. A specific open systems architecture must be developed which allows an open market of services with component access to remote services and functionality delegated to external entities. The architecture must provide mechanisms for offering services to external users and for following coordinated access to local resources and also support coherence and cooperation so that similar services are semantically uniquely defined and provided with common interfaces, while their differences are made visible and negotiable. The authors review problems associated with interactions between autonomous components of such an environment and develop general concepts for the support of cooperation. The concepts are illustrated by means of an extended client-server paradigm. A subset of these concepts is being implemented on top of BERKOM, a broadband ISDN testnet. The conceptual details and outline implementation aspects are discussed