PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF INTEGRATED IN B-ISDN SIGNALING PLATFORMS/

The integration of intelligent networks (IN) and B-ISDN signalling is considered as a prominent and robust solution to the rapid deployment of multimedia application services. The main advantage of this approac h is that the network can offer advanced services without significant modifications to existing broadband signalling systems. The IN/IB-ISDN signalling platform will include a set of new elements as the broadba nd service control point (B-SCP) and the broadband service switching p oint (B-SSP), which will provide all the functionality required for th e processing of user requests for complex multimedia services. The per formance of these elements and their protocols is a crucial factor for network design as it determines the total number of calls the network can admit with acceptable call set-up delay. In this paper we study t he performance of an IN/B-ISDN integrated architecture by developing a set of protocol models and analysis techniques which are also applica ble to other systems. Results show that the proposed architecture cons titutes a promising and robust solution that can guarantee a smooth an d cost effective evolution to multimedia networks. (C) 1998 Elsevier S cience B.V.