Untersuchungen von Performance-Auswirkungen auf das GSM-Netz durch Einführung eines zentralen Home-location-Register

The future of any communication system will be based on IP. The present fixed and mobile networks, WLAN and UMTS are some of the new technologies which are foreseen to carry many new service applications based on IP. But this will be used only as a transport network. Older, complex network architectures still remain. In the near future, it is expected that mobile networks will go beyond connecting people and will connect an increasing number of machines, appliances, consumer devices, sensors and actuators. Also, users will connect through personal area networks and the importance of user profiles and service profiles will grow. Most certainly, mobile applications will grow beyond serving human users, and increasingly serve vehicles (e.g. for telematics), vending machines and machine to machine communication in general. In addition, the applications contain their own subscriber data, usually stored locally in the application's database (distributed across the network), managed from their own management systems and with their own interfaces to Customer Care and Billing Systems. The classical telecommunication and the classical IP design approach are different in several points. In current designs, databases like HLR, AAA-Servers, MMS, Number Portability and others keep a significant amount of identical data that have to be kept consistent across all applications. For Network Operators, the effort to plan, to administrate and to introduce new services in those networks increases dramatically. New architectures, such as the IMS, maintain the current design principles. Therefore a concept describing how to simplify current and future telecommunication networks with an internet-based approach for service introduction is under preparation by major telecom equipment providers such as Alcatel-Lucent. The concept uses already available mechanisms, like Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Fast Web Services from the Internet-network and -service approach to simplify classical telecommunication networks. In this environment the performance of such a new telecommunication network, here referred to as a "Restructured Network", has to be analyzed, simulated and finally compared with the performance of legacy telecommunication networks. Three different approaches for a GSM-Network design during migration phase towards the new architectures were investigated: 1. As a reference model a conventional GSM-Network with 40 distributed HLR and their interconnections with a number of 64-kbit/s-links for signalling. 2. A GSM-Network with one centralized HLR, interconnection via SDH and with a high performance Database, using XML and SOAP. With this model a Gateway was introduced to adapt the ASN.1-Messages to messages with a XML-base. 3. A GSM-Network with one centralized HLR and one Cache-database with a Gateway to adapt the ASN.1-Messages interconnect via SDH to a high performance database using XML an SOAP. The results of calculation/simulation show that the Restructured Network represents a feasibly approach. With small adaptations on the GSM-side the hard requirements of for short response time could be met. The defined architecture is open for other authorization requests, via WLAN, WiMAX, and thus applies for new network architectures including IMS and TISPAN.