What is Profile

The daily activities of humans and business are increasingly depending on the usage of (digital) identity for interaction with other parties and for accessing resources. Current networks use a number of digital-identity management schemes. For example, in the public switched telephone network (PSTN), a telephone number is simply used as the digital identity of a user. Most of the digital-identity management schemes are effective only within their networks and have limited support for interoperability. In the hybrid network environment of next-generation networks (NGNs), new digital-identity management models are expected to be proposed for digitalidentity management. The rest of the chapter is focused on the introduction of digital identity, the digital-identity schemes used in current telecommunication networks, and the future trends.