A Practical Architecture for Signaling Type Approval Platforms

Nowadays, the importance of Telecommunications and Information Technology is growing all over the world and end customers demand for new and wider communication services. Service providers, driven by the market, are very sensitive and highly innovative. As a direct consequence, the Regulatory control of this sector is becoming one of the most important issues for national governments. Coping with complex demands in time-effective manner, supervising a fast growing market and considering performance analysis are all essential steps in opening the national telecommunications market. Therefore, national governments are establishing a formal national Type Approval system as the basis and frame for accomplishing these goals. In this paper, we propose an effective architecture for a modular signaling type approval platform (STAP) which could be used by service providers, regulatory bodies and approval bodies to evaluate the quality of service degree in regard with the signaling section of switching systems. Finally we describe a practical sample designed and implemented at testing laboratories of Iran Telecom Research Center (ITRC) based on the proposed architecture. Describing definition, strategy or process of type approval (TA) is not the goal of this paper.