Telecommunication Networks (ECEg-4282)

Chapter Two
Basics of Telecom Networks
By Samson.A.

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Outline
2.1 Communication Networks

2.2 Network principles

2.3 Introduction to Traffic Characterization and QOS

2.4 Network Services

2.5 Network Elements

2.6 Basic Network Mechanisms

2.7 Layered Architecture

 Introduction
 The basic purpose of a telecommunications network is to transmit
user information in any form to another user of the network.
 User information may take many forms, such as voice, data, and
video which use different access network technologies.

2.1 Communication Networks

 Communication networks enable users to transfer information.
 Users request the communication service they need by means of
networked devices using:
 Telephone handset or cellular phone, o r
 Through applications running on a host computer such as a PC
or workstation .

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Communication Networks

1. Telecommunication Networks
2. Computer Networks
3. Cable Television Networks and
4. Wireless Networks

 If we consider the customers of networks and the

availability of services, there are two broad categories:
A. Public Networks and
B. Private or Dedicated Networks.

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A. Public Networks
 Public networks are owned and managed by telecommunications
network operators.
 These network operators have a license to provide
telecommunications services.
1. Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN): is the main public
network in use.
 PSTN is the main system which forms the world’s telephone

network.
 The PSTN is the system which allows any phone in the world

to connect to any other phone in the world.

2. Public Land Mobile Telephone Networks (PLMN):
 They are regional or national access networks and
connected to the PSTN for long-distance and international
connections.
 The Cellular networks connect mobile phones to the PSTN. 5
Public Networks continued …

3. Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)

 Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of
communication standards for digital telephone connection and the
transmission of voice and data over a digital line. These digital
lines are commonly telephone lines and exchanges established by
the government.
 Before ISDN, it was not possible for ordinary telephone lines to
provide fast transportation over a single line.
4. Internet
a global computer network providing a variety of information and
communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks
using standardized communication protocols.
5. Radio and Television Networks: are usually unidirectional radio
distribution networks for mass communications.

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B. Private or Dedicated Networks

 Private networks are built and designed to serve the needs of

particular organizations.
 They usually own and maintain the networks themselves.
1. Voice Communication Networks: Examples of private dedicated voice
networks are those used by the police and other emergency
services.
2. PBX Networks (Private branch exchange)
 Are private networks used by companies and organizations
 If necessary, they can be connected to the fixed line network to
connect outside the organization
3. Data Communication Networks: Data communication networks are
dedicated networks especially designed for the transmission of
data between the offices of an organization.
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Private Network Continued…

4. Virtual Private Networks (VPN): provides a service similar to an

ordinary private network, but the systems in the network are the
property of the network operator.
 In effect, a VPN provides a dedicated network for the customer
with the help of public network equipment.
 In general, a virtual private network that is established over the
Internet
 It is virtual because it exists as a virtual entity within a public
network
 From the user’s perspective, it appears as a network consisting
of dedicated network links
 These links appear as if they are reserved for the VPN client-tele
 Because of encryption, the network appears to be private

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 2.2 Networking Principles:
The four principles that underlie the growth of communication network services
are:
• Digitization: There are two aspects to digitization.
• First, any information-bearing signal can be represented by a binary

string with an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy.

• Second, it is much cheaper to store, copy, manipulate, and transmit a

digital signal than an analog signal, because advances in electronics

have made digital circuits much more robust and cheaper than analog
circuits.
• Economies of Scale:
• Communication networks exhibit scale economies.
• That is, the average cost per user of the network declines as the network
increases in size, measured by number of users, subscribers, or host
computers.
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 Continued …
Network Externalities:

• When two independent networks are interconnected, the value to the

users of both networks increases.

• The extra resources needed to implement the interconnection are few if

the two networks follow compatible standards.

• The combination of network scale economies, which reduce per user

cost as the network grows, and network externalities, which increase
per user benefits as the network grows, creates positive feedback that
can lead to an exponential growth in demand and supply of network
services.

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Service Integration:

Service Intigrations are possible because communications engineers now

design services in a modular and standardized way so that new services
can be introduced using existing hardware and software modules.
• The widespread deployment of ATM, and broadband access over
cable TV and ADSL, will facilitate service integration to such an
extent that one can imagine a single network that will provide all of
the services that today are provided by separate networks.
• These services include telephone, data, broadcast TV and radio, and
CATV.

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2.3 Introduction to Traffic Characterization and QOS:

 Traffic Characterization describes the traffic that the applications generate

as well as the acceptable delays and losses by the network in delivering that
traffic.
The information that applications generate can take many forms: Text,
Voice, Audio Data, Graphics, Pictures, and Videos

 Moreover the information can be:

• One-way
• Two-way
• Broadcast or
• Multi-point

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Continued …

 We classify all traffic into three types. That is a user application can
generate:
• Constant bit rate (CBR)
• Variable Bit rate (VBR) or
• A sequence of Messages with different temporal characterstics

For the voice or video application to be an acceptable quality,

the network must transmit the bit stream with a short delay and
corrupt at most a small fraction of bits.
This fraction is called the bit error rate (BER)

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 Constant Bit Rate
 To transmit a voice signal, the telephone network equipment first converts
it into a stream of bits with a constant rate of 64Kbps.
 Video compression standards convert a video signal into a bit stream with
a CBR.
 For instance, MPEG1 produces a poor quality video at 1.15Mbps and a
good quality at 3 MBps.
 CBR stands for constant bitrate, and is an encoding method that keeps
the bitrate the same. When audio data is encoded (by a codec), a fixed
value is used, like 128, 256 or 320 Kbps.

 Stream an audio more efficiently

 Quality of the encoded content is not constant
 Because some content is harder to compress than others
 Different song encoded with same bit rate may result in different
quality
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 CBR…..
• Constant bit rate (CBR)— CBR provides a constant, guaranteed rate to
real-time applications, such as streaming video, so it is continuous
bandwidth.
• It emulates a circuitswitched approach and is associated with minimum
latencies and losses.
• CBR is the highest class of service that you can get and it's for very
demanding applications, such as streaming media, streaming audio,
streaming video, and video-on-demand.
• Initially CBR was to be used for things like voice and
videoconferencing, but we have found that in fact in those applications
we don't necessarily need the continuous bandwidth. As oviouslly much
of a voice conversation is silence.
• If we were to be carrying that voice over CBR service, whenever there
was silence, the ATM switches would be stuffing in empty cells to
maintain that continuous bandwidth, and of course that's overkill and a
waste of network resources.
Variable Bit Rate
 Some signal compression techniques convert a signal into a bit stream
that has a variable bit rate.
 For instance, MPEG2 is a family of standards for such variable bit rate
compression of video signals.
 Try to achieve best quality
 Use different bit rate for each frame of the MP3 file
 Use a higher bit rate if needed
 Better quality
 Result with a larger file size
 Many MP3 players do not support VBR
Messages
Many user applications on a network are implemented by processes
that exchange messages.
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 VBR….

• Variable bit rate (VBR)— VBR has two subsets: real-time (VBR-RT)
and nonreal-time (VBR-NRT).
• VBR provides a fair share of available bandwidth according to a
specific allocation policy, so it has a maximum tolerance for
latencies and losses. VBR is the highest class of service in the data
realm, and it is also an adequate class of service for real-time voice.
• VBR-RT can be used by native ATM voice with bandwidth
compression and silence suppression. So when somebody is silent,
VBR-RT makes use of the available bandwidth to carry somebody
else's cells, making VBR appropriate for multimedia functions such
as videoconferencing.
• VBR-NRT can be used for data transfer where response time is
critical (for example, transaction-processing applications such as
airline reservations, banking transactions).
 Which to Use and When
Compatibility
Generally speaking, encoding an MP3 track or podcast using a constant bit
rate will be better for the sake of compatibility compared to using a variable
bit rate, as some older MP3 players don’t support variable bit rates.
Quality
If compatibility isn’t a significant issue for you, then you will probably be
better off using a form of variable bit rate of encoding to squeeze the best
audio quality that you can out of the available bits.
• The advantage of using the CBR method is that audio data typically
processes faster (compared to VBR). However, the files that are created
aren't as well optimized for quality versus storage like is the case with VBR.
• the disadvantage of VBR encoded files is that they might not be compatible
with older electronic devices like CBR is. It also takes longer to encode
audio using VBR because the process is more complex.
• The biggest advantage of VBR when compared to CBR is sound quality to
file size ratio. You can usually achieve a smaller file size by encoding audio
with VBR than CBR because of the way bitrate is altered depending on the
nature of the sound.
 In Summary

Constant Bit Rates Variable Bit Rates

Variable Audio Quality Constant, Definable Audio Quality
Predictable File Sizes Unpredictable File Sizes
Compatible With Most Systems Unpredictable Compatibility
audio data typically processes faster It also takes longer to encode
Quality of service (QoS)

• Quality of service means how happy the telephone company

(or other common carrier) is keeping the customer.
• The transmission engineer calls QoS customer satisfaction, which is
commonly measured by how well the customer can hear the calling
party.
• The unit for measuring how well we can hear a distant party on the
telephone is loudness rating, measured in decibels (dB).
• From the network and switching viewpoints, the percentage of lost
calls (due to blockage or congestion) during the BH certainly
constitutes another measure of service quality. Remember,
• this item is denominated grade of service. One target figure for grade
of service is 1 in 100 calls lost during the busy hour.

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Other elements to be listed under QoS are:

 Delay before receiving dial tone (dial tone delay);

 Post dial(ing) delay (time from the completion of dialing the last digit of a
number to the first ring-back of the called telephone).This is the primary
measure of signaling quality;
 Availability of service tones [e.g., busy tone, telephone out of order, time
out, and all trunks busy (ATB)];
 Correctness of billing;
 Reasonable cost of service to the customer;
 Responsiveness to servicing requests;
 Responsiveness and courtesy of operators; and
 Time to installation of a new telephone and, by some, the additional
services offered by the telephone company.

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2.4 Network (Communication) Services:

 Network (Communication) Services Are:

1. Connection-Oriented Service and
2. Connectionless Service
1. Connection-Oriented Service
 Data handling involves using a specific path that is established for the
duration of a connection
 Connection-oriented service involves three phases:
 connection establishment,
 data transfer, and
 connection termination.
 During the connection-establishment phase, a single path between the
source and destination systems is determined. Network resources
typically are reserved at this time to ensure a consistent grade of service,
such as a guaranteed throughput rate.
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Continued …
 In the data-transfer phase, data is transmitted sequentially over the
path that has been established. Data always arrives at the destination
system in the order in which it was sent.
 During the connection-termination phase, an established connection
that is no longer needed is terminated
 It provides:
 Reliable, in-order byte delivery
 Flow control
 Congestion control
 Internet’s connection-oriented service is TCP (Transmission Control
Protocol).
 Applications using TCP: Email (SMTP), web browsing (HTTP), and
file transfer (FTP)
 Connection-oriented network service carries two significant
disadvantages over connectionless:
 static-path selection and 23

 the static reservation of network resources.

In the connection-oriented environment, the entry node contains the
routing table, where the path is calculated and determined, and all
packets follow that same path on to the destination node, thereby
offering a better guarantee of service.
 Connectionless Services
 Data handling involves passing data through a permanently established
connection.
 It provides:
unreliable data transfer
no flow control
no congestion control
 Internet’s connectionless service is UDP (User Datagram Protocol.
 Applications using UDP: streaming media, video conferencing, and IP
telephony.
A connectionless environment worries about getting a packet one step closer
to the destination. It doesn't worry about having an end-to-end view of the
path over which the message will flow.
Examples of connectionless packet-switched networks include the public
Internet, private IP backbones or networks, Internet-based VPNs, and LANs.
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Each router performs a path calculation function independently, and each
relies on its own type of routing protocols (for example, Open Shortest Path
First [OSPF], Intermediate System to Intermediate System [IS-IS], or Border
Gateway Protocol [BGP]). Each router calculates the appropriate next hop
for each destination
 Connection-oriented versus Connectionless
 Connectionless service, however, offers two important advantages
over connection-oriented service:
 dynamic-path selection and
 It enables traffic to be routed around network failures because

paths are selected on a packet-by-packet basis.

 dynamic-bandwidth allocation.
 With dynamic-bandwidth allocation, bandwidth is used more

efficiently because network resources are not allocated a

bandwidth that they will not use.
 A prior connection setup is needed in connection-oriented service but
not in connectionless service.
 Connection-oriented service guarantees reliability but not
connectionless service.
 Congestion is very unlikely in connection-oriented service but not in
connectionless.
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 Lost data retransmission is possible in connection-oriented service but
not in connectionless service.
 Connection-oriented is suitable for long connection while
connectionless is suitable for a bursty connection
 Packets reach the destination following the same route in connection-
oriented service, but for connectionless, the packets can take different
paths.
 Resource allocation is needed in the connection-oriented but not in the
case of connectionless service.
 The transfer is slower in the connection-oriented due to connection
setup time and ACK but is faster in connectionless service due to
missing initial setup and ACK.
Telecommunication Services
 In general, telecommunication services can classified into three broad
categories.
i. Basic Services
 Are services that everyone needs
 Ask cost
ii. Supplementary Services
 Additional services for ease of communication
 Provided without cost
iii. Value-added Services
 Additional services for effective communication
 Ask some cost
 Example telebanking.

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2.5 Network Elements

 A Communication Network is a collection of network elements

interconnected and managed to support the transfer of information from a
user at one network location or node to a user at another node.
A telephone network comprises:
• Switching points,
• Communications lines, and signaling
• Telephone sets.

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Telecommunication System Components

 All telecommunication networks are made up of five basic

elements that are present in each network environment
regardless of type or use.
 These basic components include:
 Terminals,
 Telecommunications Processors,
 Telecommunications Channels,
 Computers and
 Telecommunications Control Software.

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Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Terminals:
 Input / Output Devices
 Any input or output device that is used to transmit or receive data can be
classified as a terminal element.
 are the starting and stopping points in any telecommunication network
environment.

 Telecommunication processors:
 support data transmission and reception between terminals and
computers by providing a variety of control and support functions (i.e.
convert data from digital to analog and back).

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Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Telecommunication (Communication) channels:

 are the way by which data is transmitted and received.
 are created through a variety of media of which the most popular
include copper wires and coaxial cables.
 Fiber-optic cables are increasingly used to bring faster and more robust
connections to businesses and homes.

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Continued …
 A transmission link transfers a stream of bits from one end to the other
at a certain rate with a given bit error rate and a fixed propagation time.
 Transmission systems use four basic media for information transfer
from one point to another:
1. Copper cables, such as those used in LANs and telephone
subscriber lines
2. Optical fiber cables, such as high-data-rate transmission in
telecommunications networks;
3. Radio waves, such as cellular telephones and satellite
transmission;
4. Free-space optics, such as infrared remote controllers.

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Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Computers:
 In a telecommunication environment computers are connected
through media to perform their communication assignments.
 Early networks were built without computers, but late in the 20th
century their switching centers were computerized or the networks
replaced with computer networks.

 Telecommunications control software:

 is present on all networked computers and is responsible for
controlling network activities and functionality.

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2.6 Basic Network Mechanism
 A network bearer services comprise the end-to-end transport of bit streams,
in specific formats over a set of routes.
 These services are differentiated by quality:
• Speed, delay, errors.
 They are produced using five basic mechanisms:
1. Multiplexing
• Multiplexing combines data streams of many users into one large
bandwidth stream.
• Users thereby can share the large bandwidth.
Various techniques—including
• Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM),
• Time Division Multiplexing (TDM),
• Statistical Time Division Multiplexing (STDM),
• intelligent multiplexing, inverse multiplexing, and
• Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)/
• Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM/OFDM) 36
2. Switching
• Switching allows us to bring together the data streams of dispersed
users.
• In telephone networks, a switch is located in the central office.
• A link between two switches is called a trunk.
• A link between a subscriber telephone and a switch is called an
access line orsubscriber loop.

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Fig. A Basic Telecommunications Network

 Continued …

3. Error Control: All transmission links occasionally corrupt the messages

they transmit. It is therefore important for the network to control such
errors.
• a process of detecting and correcting errors, takes a number of forms, the
two most common of which are parity checking and cyclical redundancy
checking.
4. Flow control: is a mechanism that enables the receiver to pace the
transmission of the source.
5. Congestion Control: is a generic name for a set of mechanisms designed
to limit the rate or number of packets introduced into the network by a
source or a switch. If the congestion control mechanism does not
function properly, an excessive number of may accumulate in the switch
buffers causing unacceptable delay or loss.
6. Resource Allocation:
Because network resources (link bandwidth and switch buffers) are
shared by many applications at the same time, resource allocation
mechanisms must be designed to ensure that each application receives38
the necessary resources to maintain its quality of service.
2.7 Layered Architecture

 An architecture is a specific way of organizing many functions

performed by a computer network when it provides services such as: a
file transfer, e-mail, directory services, and terminal emulation.

 When protocols are arranged into layers, the protocol entities of

adjacent layers exchange messages.

 Once it gets a message, a protocol entity performs some operations

before it transmits the message to the next protocol entity.

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Example: GSM Architecture

GSM: Global System for Mobile Communications

SIM: Subscriber Identity Module
ME: Mobile Equipment
BTS: Base Transceiver System
BSC: Base Station Controller
MSC: Mobile Switching Center
HLR: Home Location Register
VLR: Visitor Location Register
AUC: Authentication Center
EIR: Equipment Identity Register
PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network

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41
 UMTS Architecture

U Iu
u Node B
MSC/
VLR GMSC
RNC

Networks
External
Node B
USI
M Cu Iur HLR
Iub

ME Node B
RNC SGSN GGSN
Node B

UE UTRAN CN

 Mobile Switching Centre (MSC)

 Switching CS transactions
 Base Stations (Node B)  Visitor Location Register (VLR)
Radio Network Controllers (RNC)  Gateway MSC (GMSC)
 Lub and lur interfaces  Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN)
 Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN)
Tone dialing and Telephone Numbering
Tone Dialing
Modern telephones usually have 12 push buttons for dialing, each generating
a tone with two frequencies. One of the frequencies is from the upper
frequency band and the other from the lower band. All frequencies are inside
the voice frequency band (300–3,400 Hz) and can thus be transmitted
through the network from end to end, when the speech connection is
established.
This signaling principle is known as dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF)
signaling.

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Telephone Numbering

 An international telephone connection from any telephone to any other

telephone is made possible by unique identification of each subscriber
socket in the world.
 In mobile telephone networks, each telephone set (or subscriber card) has a
unique identification number.
 The numbering is hierarchical, and it has an internationally standardized
country code at the highest level.
 This makes national numbering schemes independent from each other.

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Fields of the telephone number
An international prefix or international access number is used for
international calls.
 It tells the network that the connection is to be routed via an international
telephone exchange to another country.
The country code contains one to four numbers that define the country of
subscriber. Country codes are not needed for national calls because their
purpose is to make the subscriber identification unique in the world.
 A telephone number that includes the country code is called an
international number and it has a maximum length of 12 digits.
 The country codes have been defined by the ITU.
The trunk code defines the area inside the country where the
call is to be routed. The first digit is a long-distance call identification
and other numbers identify the area.

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 00 or 251 046 2207051
+

Fig. The Structure of The Telephone Number Hierarchy

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Thank
You! 48