Impacts of PCS on switching system real-time capacity

The term "Personal Communications Services" (PCS) encompasses a broad range of services designed to allow the customer to make use of the services of the wireline network without requiring that customer to access those services from one fixed network access point. This paper considers use of the local exchange Intelligent Network infrastructure to provide network access service to PCS service providers. Providing such access services will require significant modification to the existing infrastructure, in order to add the features necessary to support various aspects of mobility. Capacity and performance will be critical factors in determining an acceptable (economical and adequate-performance) architecture. This paper considers a specific PCS service where customers utilize small, light-weight, low-power portable digital radio telephones to make and receive calls while in residences, in buildings, and on the street (moving at pedestrian speeds). This paper focuses on the impact of PCS network access services on the call-processing capacity of a central-processor-based local switching system. The authors present a methodology for analyzing switch CPU real-time impact of providing PCS network access services. They also give preliminary results from this model which illustrate the potential capacity impact of providing PCS network access services. The data used as input to this study do not represent any existing implementation of PCS. This study is based on the assumption that PCS network access services are provided by a Local Exchange Carrier end office; and the results are based on real data for analogous processing tasks in a particular central-processor-based switching system. This study does show that PCS is likely to have a very significant impact on such a switch's real-time capacity, and that the switch impact is very sensitive to user mobility parameters.