Advanced intelligent network service laboratory

This paper presents the architecture of a laboratory for design, validation and execution of advanced intelligent network (AIN) services. The AIN service laboratory permits testing of new services from design to execution. It is composed of two main parts: a design environment, where design and logical validation take place, and a hardware/software system closely emulating a real AIN structure (with service switching points, service control points, etc.), where the service can be directly tested. A technical overview of the AIN service laboratory is provided, describing the following issues: a formal and practical approach to validation, ranging from traditional human inspection to automatic verification of global temporal properties; a logic-programming-based concurrency model and nondeterministic backtrackable simulator on which SDL processes, representing IN functional entities and agents, are mapped; animation of network scenarios; a service logic execution environment designed on the basis of IN functional architecture defined in CCITT draft recommendation Q1214; a standard basic call state model (BCSM)-based call control, implemented in a service switching point (SSP) emulator. Furthermore, a description of an advanced universal personal telecommunication (UPT) service for which new network capabilities such as speech recognition are integrated and tested in the AIN service laboratory, is provided as an example.