Degree project -

Call Traffic Monitoring System

Company background | Background, degree project | Project description | Time plan | Examinor and Advisor

Company background

INEO Konsult is a consulting company that develops systems and provides consulting services related to PC based Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and messaging. The company has developed systems to handle fetching of faxes, major distribution of faxes, gateways for faxes and simulation of telephony exchanges. Besides consulting services, the company has developed several products within the competence area.

Background, degree project

For a couple of years, INEO has provided consultant expertise to Ahhaaa, a company that specializes in distribution of different kinds of information. In particular Ahhaaa provides a directory inquiry service for telecommunication companies, which they in turn provide to their customers.

Ahhaaa's directory inquiry service is under reconstruction to add new services e.g. transfer of calls, be able to make test calls and more. For this purpose a new billing system for the services has to be developed. The billing system has to be able to apply different charges depending on service and also different types of charge e.g. one-time-charges and minute-based charges. Since the service is used by more than one telecommunications company, the billing system also have to distinguish between these and possibly apply different charges.

The billing system will rely on a billing database that stores information about all traffic e.g. A-number, duration, type of service etc. To supply the database with this information, it's necessary to monitor all traffic and acquire relevant data. The monitoring of traffic is critical since loss of data means that there isn't any basis for billing, thus this will have economical effects. Care has to be taken in designing the system to handle all real-time critical aspects.

Project description

System overview

The degree project will be a part of a larger system, the directory inquiry service's billing system. The parts of the billing system are:

·         Client applications called "Lyran", used by the operators. Some service specific information is generated here and is not visible through the traffic log that the TLE will use to monitor the traffic. Therefore it will be desirable to be able to synchronize these events with the corresponding traffic events, when the results are stored in the database.

·         Database server that provides the billing database. Here's where all transactions that include the necessary traffic information go. The information will be used to form so-called CDR (Call Detail Record) used by the telecommunication companies in their billing systems.

·         Trafik Log Unit (TLU) that collects all necessary information about the traffic from the PBX to be used for billing purposes, and stores this in the billing database. The TLE will have to organise synchronization between its traffic data and traffic data generated by other parts of the system. This part of the system will be the degree project.

Environment (subject of change)

The environment in which the system will reside in consists of:

·         PBX: Ericsson MD110

·         Billing server: Windows NT Server with MS SQL Server 7.0 and TLE(s)

·         Client workstations: Windows NT Workstation with client application "Lyran"

TLU specification (subject of change)

The TLE is not fully designed or analyzed yet but the following properties is suggested. This is a subject of change as the work progresses until the final specification has been determined. Suggestions to what properties the TLE should posses are:

·         TLE will monitor the traffic through an Ericsson MD110 by monitoring CIL (Call Information Log) via a serial port. This port continuously transmits log messages, one or more messages every time a call is ended.

·         TLE must be able to monitor all log messages without losses (100,00%).

·         The system should be built with redundancy. If the TLU crashes there should be a backup TLU!

·         TLU will store relevant traffic information in the billing database.

·         If the billing database is down, data should be buffered until the database is up again and data can be stored.

·         TLU will organise synchronization between itself and all other parts of the system that obtaines relevant call data.

Time plan

1.        Research - 1 week

2.        Analysis and design of TLU - 2 weeks

3.        Implementation of TLU - 4 weeks

4.        Analysis and design of alarm application - 1 week

5.        Implementation of alarm application - 3 weeks

6.        Test and integration - 4 weeks

 Examinor and Advisor

Examinor for this degree project is Prof. Seif Haridi at the Departement of Teleinformatiks (KTH/IT) at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Advisor is Vladimir Vlassov at KTH/IT.

Company background | Background, degree project | Project description | Time plan | Examinor and Advisor

Last edited 1999-06-24
by
Andreas Oderstad
homepage:
www.surf.to/oderstad