This paper discusses several aspects of the packet voice synchronization problem, and techniques that can be used to address it. These techniques estimate in some way the delay encountered by each packet and use the delay estimate to determine how speech is reconstructed. The delay estimates produced by these techniques can be used in managing the flow of information in the packet network to improve overall performance. Interactions of packet voice synchronization techniques with other network design issues are also discussed.

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It has been observed that the challenge of improving software productivity and quality is not just to “do the thing right” but to “do the right thing right.” Doing the right thing means building products and services that meet real customer needs. Specification is the first step in deriving system design from an understanding of customer needs. Technology to support software specification can, therefore, provide productivity and quality benefits that accrue through the entire product life cycle. Prototyping is an approach to system design in which a model of the system is quickly built and iteratively refined so as to become increasingly realistic. Experience with the evolving prototype leads to an improved understanding of system functionality, dynamics, and performance so that the resulting products and services are known to match customer needs before they are built. This article describes two promising approaches—software architecture modeling and application‐oriented languages—for improving software development productivity and quality through support for software specification and prototyping.

IntroductionService creation is a fundamental aspect of the promise of next-generation networks. With roots in traditional telecommunications and data networks, new service creation implementation and deployment techniques abound in vendor offerings and in proprietary schemes developed by service providers. With the challenges and complexities of converged telecommunications and data networks, and the unprecedented demand to create and deploy new revenue-generating and cost-saving services quickly, next-generation networks are compelled to provide new service creation techniques and enable thirdparty service creation. In order to do this effectively, a framework is needed that represents the types of services to be created and the techniques that can be used to create them. This paper describes a framework for service creation that can be applied to converged next-generation networks. We first look at service creation in traditional telecommunication and data networks to set the context for the framework. We then propose a network layering to describe the types of services that are created. Next, we examine service creation techniques and show how they relate to services in the network model. These techniques include the use of policies, application programming interfaces, protocols, service building blocks, and provisioning. Some of these techniques are in wide use today in traditional intelligent networks; others, such as policy management, are just beginning to be deployed in service-provider networks, and have the capability to provide service intelligence to network services. Next, we describe how services are created and deployed in