Issues on the design of survivable common channel signaling networks

Common channel signaling networks (CCSNs) play a central role in the delivery of a wide range of telecommunications services. In designing such networks, it is of paramount importance to have redundancy in CCS network elements (signaling points and signaling linksets) and to achieve architectural diversity in the transport network that provides bandwidth, transmission equipment, transport media, and physical structures to the CCSN. Such design considerations can help reduce the probability of occurrence or limit the scope of network outages due to traffic congestion and/or transmission equipment or transport facility failures. This paper contains a high-level discussion of issues relevant to the design of survivable CCSN architectures, provides a framework for CCSN survivability analysis, and presents novel heuristics that can be used to compute paths across the transport network on which to route signaling linksets, subject to diversity constraints that include combinations of “two-way diversity” and “three-way diversity.” This first attempt at formally defining the topology design problem and formulating architectural diversity constraints for CCSNs can provide the technical basis for further CCSN survivability studies