Signaling architecture evolution and personal number translation for broadband PCS networking

It is projected that the existing narrowband Signaling System Number 7 (SS7) signaling infrastructure will be unable to support the increased demand of existing services or the introduction of new services such as personal communication services (PCS). To meet the stringent delay requirements of services such as PCS, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology is being considered to provide a high speed, high bandwidth platform for the unified transport of signaling and user data. We describe three approaches that describe a potential evolutionary path for the signaling protocol stack and the signaling transport platform for supporting PCS with an ATM backbone. We present a qualitative assessment of the various architectures and describe possible migration paths. For the ATM-based long term architecture, we also describe a scheme to provide number portability. This scheme is to translate non-geographic personal numbers (NGPN) to the identify of the subscriber's home network and hence the database that maintains mobility management information for the user to provide number portability.