Intelligent Telecommunication Technologies

Telecommunication networks are extremely complex systems requiring high reliability and availability. The effective management of these networks is a critical, but complex, task. To help with this problem, the telecommunications industry has heavily invested in intelligent technologies. This chapter describes intelligent technologies and applications used within the telecommunications industry. Section 1 describes expert systems and data mining technologies. Section 2 describes several intelligent telecommunication applications and the intelligent technologies they employ. The next two sections provide detailed descriptions of representative modern telecommunication applications. Section 3 describes the ANSWER expert system, which monitors and maintains all of the 4ESS switching elements in the AT&T network. This system is noteworthy for the fact that it combines object and rule-based technologies, to gain advantages from each. Section 4 describes the use of data mining to predict extremely rare telecommunication equipment failures. This telecommunication application, and several others described earlier in the chapter, highlight the increasing use of data mining technology in the telecommunications industry to automatically acquire useful knowledge from the large quantities of data which are routinely available.