TELECOMMUNICATIONS OPERATING SYSTEM

摘要

The present invention is related to methods and apparatus that provide an Internet telecommunications operating system (iTOS) (106) that provides software developers with an intermediate layer to assist in the development of telecommunications applications for the Internet. One embodiment of the present invention includes APIs (506) adapted to communicate with the underlying general operating system (104) and the underlying hardware (300) such that a higher-level application written for use with the iTOS is portable. The iTOS automatically detects and allocates locally and remotely available hardware resources, thereby insulating the higher-level application from having to search and detect hardware. In addition, the iTOS can further include redundancy features, such as the dynamic reallocation of resources and the automatic reconfiguration of malfunctioning or overloaded hardware, thereby enhancing the robustness of a related telecommunications network as a whole.