Overview

 

Signaling System 7 (SS7) is a set of telecommunications signaling protocols. Defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), SS7 is used in the support of call services for both mobile and fixed calling.

 

In an analysis of SS7-enabling technologies, VDC, an independent technology market research and strategy firm, identified Ulticom's Signalware as #1 in SS7 signaling.

 

Ulticom's SS7 solution, Signalware^® SS7, is a complete software development and deployment environment based on the standard global telecommunications protocol. Signalware SS7 provides customers with high performance, flexible SS7 capabilities for the development of these essential and emerging revenue-generating services in the areas of Mobility, Location, Payment, Switching, and Messaging. The Signalware SS7 design supports a wide variety of SS7 standards, including those for ANSI, Telcordia, ITU, ETSI, TTC, NTT, and China (including MII certification). In addition, Signalware SS7 provides flexible support for country-specific variants of ITU ISUP.

 

According to Bob Johnson, VDC's Senior Telecom Analyst, "Ulticom's performance in the Analysis confirms their status as a market leader, and as a provider of key enabling technologies for systems and service providers globally. As new solutions come to market based on IMS, providers will want to choose trusted signaling partners such as Ulticom that provide this essential technology."

 

Ulticom's Signalware solutions enable network operators to cost-effectively and seamlessly transition their networks from SS7 to IP. As an integral part of the Ulticom Signalware offer, telecommunications equipment manufacturers can now build equipment with the capability to enable a graceful migration from SS7 to SIGTRAN. This equipment can be deployed in a traditional SS7 architecture and then migrated incrementally - link by link, device by device - to an IP transport based upon SIGTRAN. Such a migration path - with zero down time - is a critical requirement for any telecommunications equipment being deployed today. This solution developed by Ulticom, is referred to as "Super Node."

 

Signalware SS7 delivers a complete SS7 stack, including:

• Signalware SS7 Boards
• SS7 Protocols

Basic SS7 protocols determine the ability to deploy applications worldwide. Read more on SS7.

 

 

 

Signalware SS7 Key Benefits and Advantages:

 

Signalware SS7 - Fault Resiliency

Prevents Revenue Lost to Downtime

Signalware offers proven fault resilient operation with no single point of failure at the network and process management levels. The distributed architecture of Signalware SS7 includes 2-4 Computer Element (CE) clustering, load sharing, system redundancy, and dynamic or manual application failover.

• Minimizes the risk of service outage or loss of data by distributing loads across multiple active host systems
• Allows traffic load sharing and fault resiliency while maintaining a single point code
• Avoids service disruption caused by software faults that may be encountered with other fault tolerant systems

Signalware SS7 - High Performance Scalability

Sizes to Fit Applications
Signalware efficiently scales to add capacity to support high transaction applications and increased service usage. Designed to handle the most demanding applications with full utilization of all allocated links, Signalware’s integrated SS7 boards include PCI and PMC architectures and high density serial, T1/E1, and HSL physical interfaces for total SS7 optimization.

• Maintains performance consistency as systems grow with new boards, additional CEs, or are transitioned to more powerful Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)
• Creates and deploys applications on a small scale with the ability to seamlessly scale to larger systems
• Minimizes deployment costs by expanding network capacity as needed
• Allows up to 4,096 signaling links (1024 per CE)

Signalware SS7 - Out-of-the-Box Interoperability

Accelerates Deployment; Recognize Revenues Sooner
Field-proven and hardened, Signalware SS7 offers a wide array of protocol variants to meet global deployment requirements. Running on several carrier-class operating systems, including Sun^® SolarisTM and Linux^®, Signalware uses industry standard programming language
interfaces (C/C++). Signalware SS7 provides valuable benefits:

• Reduces costs by enabling the development of several service applications on the same platform
• Streamlines the development cycle with an easy to use, open development environment for creation and support of SS7 applications
• Deploys and easily migrates applications on a wide range of industry standard open computing systems
• Increases return on investment by developing applications once and deploying globally
• Support for Solaris^® 9, Solaris 10, Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, SUSE^® Linux Enterprise Server 9, and MontaVistaTM Linux Carrier Grade Edition 3.1 and 4

Signalware SS7 - Maintainability

Lowers Cost of Ownership
Ulticom offers a full SS7 middleware solution, not just a protocol stack. Signalware contains a rich set of management functions that can be extended to application components. With Signalware SS7, customers can use APIs to manage their platform without building any additional tools. Signalware SS7

• Manages the platform itself: start/stop processes, crash detection, monitoring, process recovery, etc.
• Manages / provisions with MML, GUI, SNMP, and JOAM Detects and reports system events as they occur with alarms and measurements

Signalware SS7 Features and Specs:

 

  TCAP

• Compliant with ITU-T specifi cations Q.771 - Q.775 and ANSI T1.114
• Dialogue handling, state event processing, and timing capabilities
• 32,000 simultaneous transactions per process
• Load distribution across multiple applications
• Hybrid TCAP Support
• TCAP Libraries (GSM MAP, TIA/EIA - 41 MAP, CAP, INAP, AIN)

  ISUP

• Establishes, maintains, and releases calls and connections
• Detects and recovers from protocol and software errors
• Signalware offers a flexible ISUP feature providing the customer the ability to define, in configuration files, the ISUP messages and parameters not implemented by their call control application. Flexible ISUP functionality includes:
  • Upgrades to the Signalware ISUP library to support the latest ANSI, ITU, and ETSI standards
  • Processing actions that can be customized for unsupported ISUP messages and parameters
  • Ability to increase the number of CEs supported for ISUP to match the number of CEs supported for TCAP

  SCCP

• Compliant with ITU-T Q.711-Q.714, ANSI T1.112, and TTC Q.711-714 as indicated below:
• Class - 0 (basic connectionless class), Class - 1 (sequenced connectionless class), Class
• 2 (basic connection oriented class)
• In-bound global title translations (200)/Out-bound global title translations (20,000)
• 253 subsystem numbers (SSN), 10,000 destination point codes
• Location Library (BSSAP-LE)

  MTP

• Compliant with ITU-T specifi cations Q.703, ANSI T1.111.3, and J7 TTC 701-703, NTT 701-703. Compliant with test suite Q.781. Supported features include
  • Preventative Cyclic Retransmission (PCR), basic error correction, local and remote processor outage
  • Normal and emergency alignment
  • Support for 1 and 2 byte LSSUs
• Compliant to ITU-T Q.704, ANSI T1.111.4, J7 TTC JT-Q.704, NTT-Q.704, and CH7 GF 001-9001.
• MTP capacities: 1024 link sets, 4096 links, 1024 links per CE, 10,000 routesets, 8 possible routes per routeset, 16 links per link set, 8 combined link sets
• MTP restart

 

For more information, please contact sales@ulticom.com.