The Convergence of IP and Telecommunications Networks: Research at Satakunta Polytechnic in Finland

Arto Mustonen
Satakunta Polytechnic

In this seminar, Arto Mustonen will present the research activities of Satakunta Polytechnic, Finland, in the area of next generation networks. Satakunta Polytechnic has various research projects on network convergence and service development. Their laboratory features a live fixed and mobile network for experimentation with Voice over IP, Intelligent Networks, and mobile applications. Satakunta Politectnic cooperates with Nokia, Finnet and Tampere University, and is seeking cooperation with research centers across Europe.

Arto Mustonen is a senior lecturer at Satakunta Politecnic, who teaches on network convergence, SIP, H.323, MEGACO, Wireless LAN, WAP, MMS, VoiceXML and related technologies. He is currently on leave at HP in Grenoble to take part in a joint research project on Intelligent Networks.

Last Update:

Seminar outline compiled by Víctor Torres Padrosa:

INTRODUCTION

The Satakunta region on Western Finland with its capital city, Pori, has a long history as one of the industrial centers in Finland. Satakunta is also going to take its part of the rapid growth of information industry. Satakunta has put a lot of effort and money to develop education in information technology area. Engineering education in this growing field is given in and Tampere University of Technology/Pori and Satakunta Polytechnic with its two technology units. The telecommunication sector has also been chosen to be one of the "National competence centre" program areas in the Satakunta region. This means that an emphasis is put to develop telecommunication sector in education, in research and development, and in the local enterprises. In order to speed this development work two wide projects have been carried out.

"Pilot Network" project

Its objective was to realise a network where new technologies are taken into use and where new systems, services and applications may be developed and tested in a real operator like network environment.
The ground of the pilot network was the competence of the partners involved in this project.
The basic network infrastructure is provided by Satakunta Telephone Company, which has realised the backbone of the network using SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) transmission technology utilising optical fibres.
The SDH ring with its PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) connections is used as the telecom part of the pilot network realising the voice transmission and the SS7 (Signalling System Number 7) signalling connections.
The city-wide MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) switching uses also the SDH ring.
The IP (Internet Protocol) network part of the pilot network has been implemented as a VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) in the MAN.

"The Telecommunication Research Network" project

Based on the utilisation of the infrastructure of the "Pilot network".
The Telecommunication Research Network provides a practical platform for modern technologies that enable communication between companies and people.
The project including several research tasks, mentioning some of them: VoIP (Voice-over-IP), WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), IN/VoIP (Intelligent Network/VoIP) convergence, data security arrangements in network, VoiceXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language), location based services, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), is finishing at the end of 2002.

These projects have been carried out in co-operation with Tampere University of Technology/Pori, Satakunta Polytechnic, Satakunta Telephone Company and Yomi Applications Oy.

THE NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

The Research Network, shown in Figure 1, is composed of telecom and IP networks and gateways connecting them together to enable convergenced services.

IP network is implemented using VLAN technology and VLAN is built on Satakunta Telephone Company's metropolitan area network.
VLAN makes it possible to all participants to access all the services in the Research Network. VLAN is brought to customers as a fibre connection that provides 10 Mbps transmission capacity. Fibre connection is converted to 10 Mbps Ethernet connection at the end of each connection

Figure 1. Telecommunications Research

A. Telecom part

The main part of the telecom network is the IN (Intelligent Network) laboratory of Satakunta Polytechnic. Figure 2 presents the structure of the telecom part and the gateways between telecom network and IP network. Also the IP functionalities of the IN laboratory are shown.

Nokia DX 200 Global System for Mobile (GSM) system with Siemens base station system and Nokia DX220 fixed network telephone exchange has been used to manage fixed line and mobile phone calls.
IN services are executed in Hewlett-Packard open call multiservice control platform.
Restricted voice and signalling connections to the public telephone exchange of Satakunta Telephone Company have been realised as E1 voice trunks and SS7 link. This is why it is possible to test services also using subscriber accesses in the public network.
It is also possible to access the services of the Research Network using mobile city phones by routing calls from a numbering area which is reserved for the mobile city accesses, via the mobile network to the switch of Satakunta Telephone Company. This regional switch routes the calls to the switch of the IN laboratory.
Calls from the fixed network subscriber interfaces of the IN laboratory to the mobile city numbers are routed via the switch of Satakunta Telephone Company to the mobile switch.
The SS7 is used for carrying the signalling information between network elements. The addressing uses the national point codes to address the signalling functionalities in the network elements. The point codes used belong to the Finnish national numbering scheme.
The IP (Intelligent Peripheral) with specialised resource function functionality, belonging to the IN concept, has been realised using the Yomi Telement. This system may be used for example to run different kind of spoken announcements being part of some IN services.

The arrangement described above makes it technically possible to test systems, services and applications in an environment typical to a network operator, which has also an IN platform.

Fig. 2. PBX, GSM, VoIP components of the Research Network.

B. IP part

A signalling gateway (Ericsson) has also been taken into use to carry SS7 signalling over IP network. This makes it possible to realise IN functionalities in IP network and use these over IP network.
One research item has been to develop a so-called IP SCP (Service Control Point) functionality, which is a SCP locating in the IP network and is accessed using the signalling gateway [1]. The IP SCP with basic INAP (Intelligent Protocol Application Part Protocol) message set is now operating and can offer some demonstration services, for example a televoting service.
It is possible to test and analyse phone calls very flexibly way with the help of the existing VoIP and PSTN/GSM (Public Switched Telephone Network/GSM) facilities in the Research Network.
The VoIP-components of the Research Network are used to provide real-time phone calls services. Besides of the phone call services the network contains also the environment to develop interactive voice response services, shown in figure 3.
The application environment for service developing is IBM WebSphere Voice Server, which interprets VoiceXML-commands. The voice server is connected with an GetVocal's VoiceXML gateway to the PSTN network so that the interactive voice response services are also in use with fixed line telephones.
Several base stations are connected to the Research Network. All the developed services can be therefore demonstrated with the mobile laptops and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) equipments. The access controller can be connected to the authentication server supporting IEEE802.1x authentication framework i.e. Radius/Diameter/EAP interfaces.
The Research Network provides the basic elements for SMS/MMS service creation. The RealWow mobile gateway connects to the Research Network supports WAP/WTA (WAP/Wireless Telephony Application) interface and several bearers including e.g. SMS bearer and WAP 1.2 push messages.
The Codebird's MMS multimedia gateway solution has been used for service demonstration over different proprietary interfaces offered by various MMS center manufacturers. The supported MMSE (MMS Environment) interfaces cover interfaces such as MM1, MM4 and MM7.

Fig. 3. WLAN, location and interactive voice components of the Research Network.

C. Data Security solution

The data security for the Research Network has been implemented with Secgo Crypto IP VPN (Virtual Private Network) solution [2]. The separate networks have been secured with Secgo Crypto IP Server, which is a security gateway. It provides methods for protected communications secure user authentication and access right control.

Fig.4. VPN solution based on Secgo Crypto IP.

The use of NetSeal's RoamMate MPN (Mobile Private Network) mobility client-gateway tunnelling ensures data encryption and message authentication regardless of access technology.

D. The Telecommunications Research Network services and research items

IN services to telephone network e.g. VPN, homeline and reachability Service

VPN is a service where a private numbering plan is used.
Reachability service enables call routing to several subscriber numbers. A person can set numbers where he or she can be reached. It is also possible to connect reachability service to voice mail service.
An example of an advanced convergenced service is a televoting service implemented using the IP SCP [3].

Voice transfer in IP network

Can be implemented e.g. by using NetMeeting software or by using an IP phone, which needs server software to operate.
Voice transfer in IP network is also possible using SIP technology.
In this project the development of IN technology and VoIP technology has been studied. In VoIP technology the first target was to implement H.323 based functionalities in the network and during the last year the focus has been changed to SIP based solutions and Megaco Architecture [4]. A SIP based solution has also been integrated in the research network now [5].
One part of the research concerns the integration of IN and VoIP technologies. The solutions proposed by different standardisation bodies and study groups have been studied [6] (TIPHON, SPIRITS, PINT).

GML and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) in the position based applications for WLAN users

The position of the user is defined in the Ekahau position server.
The maps of the WLAN hot spots are retrieved from the archive and shown to the user in vector format.
The vector format allows instant zooming and rolling of the screen without need for new data loading.
Because the web browsers are not supporting directly SVG, the proper plug-in must be installed earlier.
Another service in the project was a management tool for operators to analyse the number of the WLAN users in the hot spots.
Detailed description of the GML services can be read in the article made by Koskela [7].

VoiceXML services

Covers the topics such as voice-activated email service, juke-box type of media player and some interactive game demonstrations.
The correctness and sensitivity of the speech recognition of the IBM product are not so good as expected. Still the TTS (Text-To-Speech) properties of the interactive voice responsive services were usable.
More information can be found in the article made by Kukka [8].

MMS and WAP

The user interface of the MMS service in different type of end-equipment can be shown according to the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) 2.0 capsulation method.
Excellent tool to analyse beforehand the developed service in the different screen types and resolutions.
More information about MMS services can be found on reference [9].
The use of WAP push messages in sending email messages for mobile equipment is dealt in the article [10].

FUTURE PLANS

Challenge in addition to network solutions: control and realisation of services in these networks.
In next generation networks are open networks, where it is possible to be also other service providers than the network operator, there may be problems to fulfil the requirements caused by service mobility and service integrity.
Different open standardised interfaces (API´s) are being developed: Parlay, OSA (Open Service Architecture) and JAIN (Java Advanced IN).
Using these interfaces, figure 5, it could be safely possible to use the service control of third party systems.
The achieved benefit is that the number of potential service providers increase and it could be possible to develop and bring new services to market faster than nowadays.
Solutions to enable flexible use of different networks, interworking of different signalling systems, development of economical IP based services, authentication of terminals and UMTS release 4/5 services, will be researched, developed and implemented.

Fig. 5. Parlay API.

REFERENCES

[1] J. Aromaa, J. Niemi: "IP SCP"
[2] H. Lindholm-Ventola: "VPN "
[3] I. Trast, D. Draus, A. Mustonen: "Televoting for the IP-SCP"
[4] J. Peltola, J. Aromaa, A. Mustonen: "Towards Megaco Architecture",
[5] H. Lindholm-Ventola, A. Mustonen: "Session Initiation Protocol",
[6] P. Kuuppelomäki A. Mustonen: "Open architectures in telecommunication and IP convergence"
[7] M. Koskela. "Location-based services in wireless local-area networks"
[8] P. Kukka "VoiceXML"
[9] S. Gratschew, et al "MMS"
[10] M. Suominen "WAP"

LINKS AND OTHER REFERENCES

• J. Ylinen, P. Loula, A. Mustonen. "Architecture solutions for telecommunication network convergence"
• P. Loula, A. Mustonen, J. Ylinen. "The Telecommunication Research Network in Pori Finland"

• Slides of the presentation given by Mr. Mustonen at UPF on November 7th, 2003:

      1. Finland in International comparison [400 kB]
      2. Telecommunications in Finland [545kB]
      3. Tekes, the National Technology Agency finances research and development (R&D) projects of companies and universities in Finland. [3,4 MB]
      4. The Nets Programme (Finnishtelecommunications industry in research and development of wireless systems and broadband networks) [1 MB]
      5. Technical presentation. [1][1,5 MB][2][1,1MB][3][1,17 MB][4][700 kB]