The objectives of Signaling System No. 7(SS7) common channel signaling are to provide an open control network that allows the building of enhanced network services in addition to standard Plain Old Telephone Service(POTS) trunk network services. Therefore, the SS7 signaling network is considered to act a very important role for providing various services in the current and future ISDN, mobile networks, and intelligent networks. During the design and development phase of a signaling network, or when new services are to be introduced in an existing network, performance modeling and evaluation is needed to estimate the resulting quality of services.
In this Thesis, we develop a SS7 simulator to evaluate a single mated pair (SMP) signaling network in terms of end-to-end delay of signaling messages, ISDN call setup delay, and signaling message processing delay of MTP level 3, during normal traffic load conditions as well as abnormal traffic load conditions. The abnormal states include the failures of link, linkset, and/or signaling points. We can also analyze the transient responses through this SS7 simulator according to fluctuations in traffic loads, link failures, and node failures. Using the modular design of SS7 simulator we model any given signaling network configuration as detailed as possible and characterize its performance for specific classes of calls and services. The dynamic responses of the network can be analyzed for a certain observing interval. The automatic reconfiguration of the SS7 network due to congestion or failures can be also observed. The proposed simulator of common channel signaling networks can offer a new approach to analyzing the performance under dynamically varying loads and failures on network elements. This simulator can be further extended to analyzing the performance of emerging advanced intelligent networks(AIN) and personal communication services(PCS) networks, based on SS7 system.
