Feature Interactions In Telecommunications Systems

In an information society, heavily dependent on communications and distributed systems, feature interactions are likely to become an even more important problem than they are today. A particularly interesting issue, given the current work on agents, is whether feature interactions will be more likely in systems with many autonomous agents performing tasks. The current demand for better and more convenient communications requires development of a variety of new services as quickly as possible. As the number of services becomes larger, however, feature interactions create incompatibilities between the various functions needed to implement them. In developing telecommunication systems, we now spend huge numbers of person-hours on software modifications and testing whenever a new function is added. Much of this time is spent on detecting and eliminating problems arising from feature interaction. In the future, as ever more services are offered, feature interactions will become a major bottleneck in the development of software for telecommunications systems. This book presents opinions on the technical problems involved in feature interactions and definitions of features and feature interactions.

Feature interaction is a phenomenon known to the designers of modern telephone switching systems. This phenomenon occurs when one feature modifies or subverts the operation of another one. This work brings together representatives of the telecommunications industry and the software industry.

Features - additional services - occur whenever organisations compete by differentiating their products from those of rival organisations. Adding one feature may break another, or interfere with it in an undesired way. This phenomenon is called feature interaction. This book explores ways in which the feature interaction problem may be mitigated.

The International Conference on Feature Interactions in Software and Communication Systems (ICFI) has evolved out of the Feature Interaction Workshop (FIW), which started in 1992 as the leading forum for discussion and reporting on research on feature interactions in telecommunications systems. It is now concerned with feature interaction in all types of software systems. Participation includes practitioners, researchers and educators. The proceedings have been published by IOS Press since 1994.

This publication deals with the feature interaction problem in telecommunication systems. In this domain, an interaction occurs when one telecommunications feature/service modifies or subverts the operation of another one. Undesired interactions can both lower this quality and delay service provisioning. Therefore, the problem of feature interactions in telecommunications is of great importance. In the past decade, a lot of attention has been devoted to the development of methods for detection and resolution of feature interactions. However, this feature interaction phenomenon is not unique to the domain of telecommunications systems. It can also occur in any large software system that is subject to continuous changes. All the submitted papers in this publication have been peer reviewed by at least two reviewers drawn from industry or academia.

Features are modifications to the control of telecommunications services. A feature interaction occurs when the behaviour of another, which can lead to unexpected or undesired behaviour, which affects the quality of service. The goal of this volume is to generate a combination of techniques through protocol engineering, software testing, formal techniques and AI and applications to telecommunications services.

Deals with the feature interaction problem in telecommunication systems.