Realising Effective Intelligent Network Overload Controls

• Authors: Philip M. Williams;Martin J. Whitehead
• Venue: BT Technology Journal
• Year: 2002

The traffic attracted by intelligent network (IN) services is often volatile in nature. Many IN realisations have a centralised physical architecture (although the standards only define the functional architecture in a distributed way), which means that they are vulnerable to overload from incoming traffic, which it is therefore essential to control. An IN platform typically has a processing capacity much greater than each network destination to which it routes traffic. Therefore control of outgoing traffic is necessary as well. IN standards only define a means to carry control messages — they do not provide methods to achieve effective overload control. This paper presents overload control designs which integrate these principles and thus meet fundamental requirements such as bounding response times and limiting ineffective traffic, while maximising the occupancy of network destinations. It is also shown how control parameter values may be optimised by appropriate modelling.