Impact of new services on SCP performance

The author presents a vendor perspective on how the introduction and growth of many current and planned intelligent network features and services impact service control point (SCP) performance requirements such that the SCP system architecture design must provide flexible capacity options so that new services may be added and expanded gracefully without impacting existing services. It is shown that transaction capacity requirements for SCP systems will vary significantly from 20 or fewer transactions per second up to 1000 or more transactions per second, depending upon the type and usage of these service applications. The author presents a methodology that allows transaction capacity for new SCP-based services to be estimated on the basis of a percentage of existing traffic. This methodology requires acknowledge of network traffic statistics by service ratio in order to estimate transaction rates. The methodology also relies on estimates for average busy season, high day, and busy hour variances, since specific applications are dependent upon actual customer calling patterns