A connection manager for flexible specification and transparent location of special resources

This paper describes a connection manager that provides services over heterogeneous communications networks which allows special resources to be located anywhere in the public network or in the customer located network(s). These special resources include (but are not limited to) signal and format converters that facilitate interworking, signal combiners and multicasters. The location of a resource depends on many factors including frequency of use, cost of resource, cost of use, who owns it and who should be allowed to use it. Given these factors and the tendency to introduce new resources at the periphery and later move them into the network, this connection manager is based on an extensible object-oriented paradigm that supports both raw transport and complex signal processing through special resources. Allowing these special resources to be placed in the network or in the periphery provides the flexibility required for the seamless migration of these resources from the periphery to the network The connection manager described in this paper allows the customer to describe the special resources desired at different levels of detail. The resources can be specified very generically allowing the network to make decisions about specific resource locality and allocation. Alternatively, the customer can specifically indicate the desired resource; potentially down to the port on a device. This flexibility permits customers with intelligent software to select the resources of their liking or customers with "dumb" terminals to have access to these special resources.< >