Distributed telecommunications services

Distributed systems emerged in the last decade as a more efficient way of sharing networked resources, allowing cooperating processes to be executed in remote computers with possibly distinct architectures and operating systems. This paper presents the motivations that may lead to the usage of distributed architectures in the support of telecommunications services, particularly multimedia services. It also gives an overview of one distributed architecture, ANSA, which was used to implement a prototype of a distributed multimedia service, briefly described.