ess is the perceived quality of the video, especially in the high- definition case. In order to assure real-time transmission, not only does the recovery time have to be controlled, but the network traversing time also has to be controlled in ordinary condition SO as to avoid a too long latency and a disordered arrival of the packets at their destination. Two steps are needed in order to satisfy technical requirements imposed by the different services while fulfilling the fundamental condition to maintain CAPEX at a minimum and achieve a relevant OPEX reduction. First of all, traditional requirements of the TDM telephone network have to be analyzed, again taking into account the new situation and the different potentialities of the packet network. Once a set of minimum network requirements that have to be satisfied are identified, a new network control plan has to be defined that is able to perform the traditional opera- tions of the network management software (called FCAPS from the initials of their descrip- tion) that will have to be defined along the following lines: Fault management Configuration management Accounting management Performance management Security management All these operations have to be performed in pace with the target OPEX reduction, with the characteristics of packet switching and with individual service requirements. There is a wide agreement in the engineering community that the aforementioned high- level requirements can be specified as follows. The new packet switched network has to be managed by a control plane having the fol- lowing characteristics: Telecommunication Networks It should be able to collect the different services delivered through the network in QoS classes, that is, collecting in the same class the service that has the same requirements as far as the transmission through the network is concerned. It should perform distributed routing of packet in the network via a distributed algorithm running in the control cards of the network equipment; this algorithm has to disting