A planning tool in support of network signalling and mobility management for Universal Personal Telecommunications

Personal Communications Services, as they evolve from a wireless access local service capability to form an integral part of Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT), may have an increasingly profound impact on the signalling architecture and signalling loads of the supporting core networks. It was therefore deemed desirable to quantitatively estimate the expected performance (in terms of delays) and loads on the signalling network infrastructure to support Personal Communications in a UPT environment (termed "PCS/UPT" in this paper). To provide that capability and to assist common carrier network planners in developing both near and long term signalling architecture plans, an analytical planning tool was developed. The requirements to model the complex signalling flows based on arbitrary traffic demand are presented. The discrete event and analytical modelling approaches are briefly discussed, followed by a description of an analytical tool developed for this application. Results obtained using this tool for satellite and terrestrial PCS applications are being prepared for future presentation