White Paper

An Overview of Circuit, Packet

and SS7/C7 Networks
Abstract
This white paper provides an overview of the
Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN),
packet-based networks, and the less-known, but
critical, SS7/C7 network. And it explains why IP
telephony switches must be able to interface
seamlessly with all three networks.

IP telephony is a new technology based upon

diverse (PSTN, SS7, IP, etc.) networks,
computer telephony integration (CTI), and new
developments in call control. In order to fully
appreciate the value of IP telephony, this white
paper discusses the fundamentals of basic IP
telephony which should provide a solid
understanding of the principles behind the Nuvo
IP telephony solution.

PSTN Infrastructure
The architecture of today's PSTN is a direct
descendant of the original manned switchboards
of Alexander Graham Bell's day. Voice is
transmitted in one way: sampled in 8-bit bytes,
8000 times a second, for an aggregate rate of 64
Kbps. The entire telephone network is designed
around this rate and for this one type of traffic
(voice).

This document is the property of Mockingbird Networks.

Its purpose is to provide educational materials on matters
relating to IP telephony and the burgeoning market for
Voice-over-IP services. Given the complexity of the
market, and the constant innovation occurring in it,
Mockingbird Networks makes no claims of completeness.
For permission to reprint any portion of this document,
please contact Mockingbird Networks.
Copyright 1998-1999 by Mockingbird Networks.
All rights reserved. 3.1

IXC

Telephone

IXC

LEC

LEC
IXC

IXC

Example of Long Distance PSTN Circuit

Telephone

The PSTN uses a circuit-switched architecture in

which a direct connection, or circuit, is made
between two users. The circuit provides a fullduplex, or bi-directional, connection with
extremely low latency, or delay, between the two
end points. This connection was once a physical
connection, but is now a logical connection
through many switches and across a variety of
wiring types (twisted-pair, fiber-optic cable,
etc.). The users have exclusive and full use of the
circuit until the connection is released.
The fact that the PSTN was designed for circuit
switching of voice calls has made it very difficult
to add new services to the network, or to increase
the efficiency of traffic handling. For example, in
a paper titled, "The Rise of the Stupid Network,"
David Isenberg, formerly with AT&T Labs,
describes an attempt to improve circuit-switched
voice quality as much as possible in the context
of the PSTNs current network architecture:
"If we had not been constrained by network
architecture, the easiest way would have been to
increase the sampling rate or change the coding
algorithm. But to actually do this, we would
have had to change every piece of the telephone
network except the wires. So we had to work

modems, fax machines, and a surprising number

of strange devices with proprietary analog
protocols. After about two years of intense effort,
we made a noticeable difference."
The PSTN has slowly evolved over the last 100
years from a mechanical switching fabric with
analog circuits to a complex mixture of analog
and digital circuits with a variety of signaling
techniques. In the age of Moore's Law, which
states that the power of microprocessors is
doubling approximately every 18 months, it took
AT&T 24 months to boost just one part of the
signal in the circuit-switched PSTN.
IP Gateways with the PTSN: The typical IP
telephony gateway is designed to sneak their way
into the PSTN by emulating a subscriber who
happens to make a cheap long distance phone
call for you. The connection is essentially free if
it is a local call. They also only take into
consideration subscriber type circuits such as
FX, T1/E1, and ISDN which offers no SS7
signaling. This approach wont last as the
RBOCs will force IP telephony service providers
to behave as IXCs (long distance companies) and
will move them to trunk-side circuits. The
benefits of free local access will disappear and
the need of true PSTN signaling will cause a
shake out in the IP gateway industry.

within the designed 64 Kbps data rate. We

discovered that voice quality could be
substantially improved by boosting the bass part
of the signal, that part of the audio spectrum
between 100 and 300 cycles per second. But as
we set out to implement this conceptually simple
improvement, we kept running into the problem
that there were too many places in the network
that had built in "intelligent" assumptions about
the voice signal; echo cancellers, conference
bridges, voice messaging systems, etc. and too
many devices that depended on these acoustic
assumptions for their correct operation

Packet Networks
Packet switching is a data transmission
technology in which data is assembled into
distinct digital "packets" with addresses that are
read by switches or routers as the packets are
received. The switches/routers forward the
packets on to the appropriate destination, but
there is not a dedicated circuit connection
between the two.
In fact, packets from a particular source may take
different routes to the same destination,
depending on varying network traffic conditions
and other factors. This type of transmission is
only half-duplex, or unidirectional, which can
easily lead to high delays between sending and
receiving. This type of network is highly
efficient for data, which can be read into memory
and reassembled at the destination.

Copyright 1998-1999 Mockingbird Networks. All rights reserved.

Server

Concentrator

Wide Area Net

Router

Router

Router

Router

Router

Mainframe

Router

IP's ability to run over any network medium

(Ethernet, FDDI, SONET, ATM, Frame Relay,
etc.) has led to its widespread adoption around
the world, and it's one of the technologies that
has enabled the growth of the public Internet. Its
popularity, though, goes far beyond the Internet,
to encompass the majority of data networks
worldwide.

SS7/C7 Network
FDDI

LAN

Typical Packet Network Configuration

The non-deterministic nature of packet
switching, however, means that some
packets will arrive out of sequence and that there
must be a mechanism to notify the sending
device when a packet is lost so that it can be
re-sent.
The Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol is a portion of the
ubiquitous TCP/IP suite. TCP/IP was originally
developed by the US Department of Defense to
link dissimilar computers across many kinds of
networks, both local area networks (LANs) and
wide area networks (WANs).
Its key feature, providing multi-vendor
connectivity, has made it popular among
network managers and administrators. The
Internet Protocol tracks Internet addresses of
nodes, routes outgoing messages, and recognizes
incoming messages. In other words, IP provides
the addressing needed to enable routers to
forward packets across multiple networks.
IP provides a connectionless Datagram service,
which means that it attempts to deliver every
packet, but has no provision for re-transmitting
lost or damaged packets. IP leaves such error
correction, if required, to higher-level protocols
such as TCP.
IP addresses are 32 bits in length and have two
parts: the Network Identifier (Net ID) and the
Host Identifier (Host ID). The Net ID is assigned
by a central authority and specifies the IP
address, unique among all entities across the
Internet. The Host ID is assigned by the local
network administrator and identifies a particular
host, station, or node within a given network,
which means that it only has to be unique within
the local network.

The SS7/C7 network is a special, private

network used for basic call setup, management,
and tear down of most of the wireline networks
in the PSTN. There are some (third-world)
countries which dont use SS7/C7 yet or use only
subsets of the protocol.
Most people rely heavily on the SS7/C7 network
without being aware of its existence. SS7/C7 is
responsible for basic call control when we place
phone calls, receive busy signals and ringing
signals. The SS7/C7 network also provides
enhanced services such as:
- toll-free (800/888) and toll (900) wireline
services
- enhanced call features such as call forwarding,
calling party name/number display, and threeway calling
- Local Number Portability (LNP) to allow the
new CLECs to attract subscribers from the
RBOCs without forcing subscriber to change
their phone numbers.
The ITU definition of SS7/C7 allows for national
variants such as the American National
Standards Institute (ANSI) and Bell
Communications Research (Bellcore) standards
used in North America and the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
standard used in Europe.
Compared to in-band signaling (non-SS7/C7),
SS7/C7 signaling provides: faster call setup
times (compared to in-band signaling using
multi-frequency (MF) signaling tones), more
efficient use of voice circuits, support for
Intelligent Network (IN) services which require
signaling to network elements without voice
trunks (e.g., database systems), and improved
control over fraudulent network usage.

Copyright 1998-1999 Mockingbird Networks. All rights reserved.

- SS7/C7 in IP Networks: SS7/C7 was created

to control PSTN voice switches (SSPs) and did
not take into account the effect of IP with PSTN
networks. A key to IP telephonys success is to
interface the IP telephony Gateway into the
SS7/C7 network in a fashion that allows it to be
managed much like a standard PSTN switch.
This is the topic of several IETF BOFs from
which a standard might eventually emerge. It
may take a considerable period of time before
any one protocol becomes an industry-wide
standard. For example, the RsVP protocol has
been in an IETF committee for over three years
and is just now starting to become an adopted
protocol by more than two vendors.

In the meantime, leadership companies such as

Mockingbird Networks are deploying IP
telephony solutions which work seamlessly with
the SS7/C7 network. Mockingbirds SS7/C7 call
control agent is software upgradeable allowing
interoperability with any potential new protocol
which might become widely adopted. Even then
it would only be necessary for interoperability
purposes with other IP telephony access products
as our SS7/C7 call control is fully certified to run
in ANSI and ITU networks.

"The nice thing about standards is that you have

so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do
not like any of them, you can just wait for next
year's model." [Tanenbaum]

Copyright 1998-1999 Mockingbird Networks. All rights reserved.