Introduction to Telecommunication Systems
Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
This chapter gives a perspective on telephone networks, local area networks and computer communication networks. We define a number of technical terms pertinent to the understanding of the structure and operation of telephone and computer communication networks. A telecommunication network can be viewed as a communication network which consists of a transmission subnetwork, a switching subnetwork, and a signaling subnetwork. These three subnetworks interact and function in a specific and cooperative way to provide good quality of service for communications. To simplify network operation and management, two types of hierarchical telephone networks, the AT & T and the ITU-T (or CCITT) networks, were established to serve all the countries in the world. Modern trends in telecommunications are to establish a universal communication network known as the broad band integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) which can handle voice, data, video and image traffic. The international standard for this network is named asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). It is well known that the call arrival process to a telephone network is a Poisson process with a constant arrival rate and that the data traffic is bursty. However, the bursty nature of data traffic is not well understood and requires much research.