Call control signalling for personal communications over interconnected metropolitan area networks

Personal communication services (PCS) are currently being developed to enable people to call other people regardless of their locations and movements. A distributed personal communication network (PCN) based on the IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area networks (MANs) has been recently proposed as a means of supporting PCS. This network must be supported by efficient and reliable signalling, which has not been extensively examined and will be the main subject of this thesis. While pre-arbitrated (PA) slots are suitable for the transport of isochronous traffic in IEEE 802.6 MANs, high priority, queue-arbitrated (QA) slots accessed by means of the distributed queue dual bus(DQDB) protocol are appropriate for the transport of signalling messages between the major network elements. The use of bandwidth balancing and erasure nodes to improve the performance of the DQDB protocol has been considered. As analytical models are not available, simulation models have been implemented to facilitate the evaluation of signalling performance in terms of signalling delays and signalling traffic levels. Using these simulation models, the relationship between PA traffic capacity and QA signalling delay has been established, and the effects of alternative signalling architectures with different bus configurations and locations of signalling network elements have been investigated. The best signalling performance is obtained in a closed bus configuration where the head of bus (HOB) stations for the two buses are physically collocated and incorporate the functions of the bandwidth manager, while the function of the signalling termination is distributed among all the MAN nodes. Signalling performance can be improved by employing erasure nodes to recover QA slots already read by their destinations. Theoptimal location for a single erasure node on each bus has been empirically determined by simulations. Logical procedures for call setup, clearing and handoff have been established for calls between mobile subscribers, through the access MANs and backbone MANs. The overlapping call setup procedure, which facilitates parallelism in call setup processing, has been proposed as a possible means of reducing call setup delays. In summary, call control signalling architecture, performance and procedures have been studied in this thesis. The results further the viability of using the IEEE 802.6 MAN to support PCS.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat