Features

Carrier Grade | Rich protocol features | Manageability

Carrier Grade
nexGen SS7 has been specifically developed to deal with the most stringent requirements of emerging networks. nexGen SS7 has been extensively tested and benchmarked on platforms of choice prior to being launched. It offers a clear competitive advantage to its customers over peer solutions.

From an enterprise point of view, nexGen SS7 offers the following career-grade features:

• Performance
  Performance has today become one of the most visible challenge facing new age networks. Ever increasing user traffic, high efficiency requirements, peak hour blues, gathering capex and opex limits further create new demands on performance. nexGen SS7 offers unrivalled performance figures obtained through a series of repetitive optimization activities conducted at system, stack, as well as transport level. nexGen SS7 has been benchmarked for high performance in all types of deployments - low-end, mid-end and high-end solutions. The solution has undergone extensive lab testing on platforms of choice. Its high performance makes a very favorable price-performance ratio for the customers, thereby maximizing return on investment.
  
  
• Scalability
  Scalability is one of the major concerns for operators all over the world. nexGen SS7 can be easily scaled up from 2 links to 2000 links. This implies that an operator can start with deploying a messaging solution handling an initial subscriber base of merely 5000 subscribers, which may be scaled up later to millions of subscribers. This can be achieved with a marginal incremental investment to the initial capex bringing down the overall cost of ownership. nexGen SS7 has already been benchmarked with other leading industry players for a high number of supported SS7 links.
  
  
• Flexibility
  Gone are the days when products used to be rigid and built for handling just one kind of solution. As a visible answer to the operator's prayers, nexGen SS7 provides unmatched flexibility wherein it can handle multiple configurations besides offering easy migration from one configuration to another. Customers may initially deploy their solution over nexGen SS7 in SS7 network and subsequently migrate to an IP network as and when the need arises. This is done with complete transparency and without any changes in the overlying application. Similarly, a customer may start with a media server built over nexGen SS7 with no interface to the external SCP and in course of time may like to add the INAP interface for the same.
  
  
• Interoperability
  In today's highly competitive environment, equipment manufacturers and application developers need to swiftly roll out best-of-breed equipments. Aricent offers you the freedom to select through guaranteed interoperability of its plug-n-play integrated solution. nexGen SS7 solution has been integrated with all the major vendors such as Alcatel, Ericsson, NEC, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens, Italtel and Nokia. No need to spend that extra time and effort on testing, simply plug in the solution. The rest has been taken care of by us.

Rich protocol features

• Multiple self point codes
• Combined linksets for load sharing on links across linksets
• Multiple Network Appearance (MNA) based on multiple Network Indicators (NI) (national/international) and variants (ITU, CHINESE, and ANSI). MNA is the ability to serve multiple networks by a single node.
• Multiple SS7 variants (ANSI, ITU, and Chinese) simultaneously
• Hybrid stack combinations, comprising of ANSI TCAP over Chinese SCCP/MTP, and Chinese TCAP over ANSI
• SCCP/MTP
• SIGTRAN (M3UA/M2UA/SCTP) connectivity (ASP or IPSP) with its network peers
• ISUP Interface for Voice and Call Control application users
• Supports High Speed Link (HSL)
• Supports SUA*

Manageability

Manageability refers to the relative ease of administering an application.

The new Aricent nexGen SS7 solution offers extensive support for configuration, provisioning and information management in an endeavor to manage the application. Manageability is achieved by the use of an element manager which is also redundant. Hence, even in the event of collapse of one element manager, the system remains manageable.

Configuration/provisioning is done in one of the following manners:

• Configuration/provisioning file
  • Command Line Interface (provided with nexGen SS7).
  • Open management interface to enable users to develop their own customized management front-end.
  • SME Application for ISUP and MAP SS7 user applications
    
    
• Alarms
  • Open APIs to dispatch alarm/events to the user management application.
    
    
• Traces
  • Several types of traces are provided to reiterate the exact state of the system.
    
    
• Centralized system-wide configuration manager to configure all the subsystems of a distributed system. This provides a simpler and faster system configuration to the user.
  

*Release available in H2, 2005