Evaluation criteria for the assessment of AIN survivability

The Office of the Manager, National Communications System (OMNCS) is charged with developing an evolutionary architecture using the existing assets of the public switched network (PSN) to meet the changing national security and emergency preparedness (NS/EP) telecommunications requirements of its 23 NCS member organizations. The OMNCS explores options for integrating new PSN-based technology into its NS/EP telecommunications plans. The advanced intelligent network (AIN) technology is one technology that is being introduced into the PSN by commercial carriers. The AIN is an evolving service independent network architecture that provides rapid service feature development and new service delivery. Because of the environment in which NS/EP users carry out their mission (e.g., during natural disasters, network congestion, and other stressed environments), their telecommunications requirements are much more stringent than those of other users. To ensure that service capabilities employed to support NS/EP are suitable from a survivability perspective, the OMNCS developed evaluation criteria that-can be used to assess the suitability of various AIN candidate configurations to support NS/EP needs based on their architectural characteristics. This paper describes the survivability criteria that can be used to evaluate the survivability of the different configurations in providing enduring NS/EP service