Intelligent Network - History and Key Concepts

History and Key Concepts

The IN concepts, architecture and protocols were originally developed as standards by the ITU-T which is the standardization committee of the International Telecommunication Union, prior to this a number of telecommunications providers had proprietary IN solutions. The primary aim of the IN was to enhance the core telephony services offered by traditional telecommunications networks, which usually amounted to making and receiving voice calls, sometimes with call divert. This core would then provide a basis upon which operators could build services in addition to those already present on a standard telephone exchange.

A complete description of the IN emerged in a set of ITU-T standards named Q.1210 to Q.1219, or Capability Set One (CS-1) as they became known. The standards defined a complete architecture including the architectural view, state machines, physical implementation and protocols. They were universally embraced by telecom suppliers and operators, although many variants were derived for use in different parts of the world (see Variants below).

Following the success of CS-1, further enhancements followed in the form of CS-2. Although the standards were completed, they were not as widely implemented as CS-1, partly because of the increasing power of the variants, but also partly because they addressed issues which pushed traditional telephone exchanges to their limits.

The major driver behind the development of the IN system was the need for a more flexible way of adding sophisticated services to the existing network. Before IN was developed, all new feature and/or services that were to be added had to be implemented directly in the core switch systems. This made for very long release cycles as the bug hunting and testing had to be extensive and thorough to prevent the network from failing. With the advent of IN, most of these services (such as toll free numbers and geographical number portability) were moved out of the core switch systems and into self-serving nodes (IN), thus creating a modular and more secure network that allowed the services providers themselves to develop variations and value-added services to their network without submitting a request to the core switch manufacturer and wait for the long development process. The initial use of IN technology was for number translation services, e.g. when translating toll free numbers to regular PSTN numbers. But much more complex services have since been built on IN, such as Custom Local Area Signaling Services (CLASS) and prepaid telephone calls.