Debre Markos University

Institute of Technology
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Telecommunication Networks (ECEg-5312)

Chapter Two
Basics of Telecom Networks

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 Introduction
The basic purpose of a
telecommunications network is to
transmit user information in any form to
another user of the network.
User information may take many forms,
such as voice, data, and video which use
different access network technologies.

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 2.1 Communication Networks
Communication networks enable users to
transfer information.
Users request the communication service
they need by means of networked devices
using:
 Telephone handset or cellular phone, o r
 Through applications running on a host
computer such as a PC or workstation .

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 Communication Networks Types are:

1. Telecommunication Networks
2. Computer Networks
3. Cable Television Networks and
4. Wireless Networks

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 Telecommunication Networks
A telephone network comprises:
• Switching points,
• Communications lines, and
• Telephone sets.
The telephone network is actually one great
communication system which encompasses
many different networks.
 If we consider the customers of networks and
the availability of services, there are two broad
categories:
a. Public Networks and
b. Private or Dedicated Networks.
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 a. Public Networks
Public networks are owned and managed by
telecommunications network operators.
These network operators have a license to provide
telecommunications services.
1. Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN): is the main public
network in use.
 PSTN is the main system which forms the world’s telephone network.
 The PSTN is the system which allows any phone in the world to
connect to any other phone in the world.
2. Public Land Mobile Telephone Networks (PLMN):
 They are regional or national access networks and
connected to the PSTN for long-distance and
international connections.
 The Cellular networks connect mobile phones to the
PSTN.
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 Example: GSM Architecture

GSM: Global System for Mobile Communications

SIM: Subscriber Identity Module
ME: Mobile Equipment
BTS: Base Transceiver System
BSC: Base Station Controller
MSC: Mobile Switching Center
HLR: Home Location Register
VLR: Visitor Location Register
AUC: Authentication Center
EIR: Equipment Identity Register
PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network
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 Public Networks continued …

3. Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)

4. Internet
5. Radio and Television Networks: are usually
unidirectional radio distribution networks
for mass communications.

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 2.Private or Dedicated
Networks
 Private networks are built and designed to serve the needs
of particular organizations.
 They usually own and maintain the networks themselves.
1. Voice Communication Networks: Examples of private dedicated
voice networks are those used by the police and other
emergency services.
2. PBX Networks
 Are private networks used by companies and
organizations
 If necessary, they can be connected to the fixed line
network to connect outside the organization
3. Data Communication Networks: Data communication networks are
dedicated networks especially designed for the
transmission of data between the offices of an
organization.
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 Private Network Continued…
4. Virtual Private Networks (VPN): provides a service similar to
an ordinary private network, but the systems in the
network are the property of the network operator.
 In effect, a VPN provides a dedicated network for the
customer with the help of public network equipment.
 In general, a virtual private network that is established
over the Internet
 It is virtual because it exists as a virtual entity within a
public network
 From the user’s perspective, it appears as a network
consisting of dedicated network links
 These links appear as if they are reserved for the VPN
client-tele
 Because of encryption, the network appears to be private

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 2.2 Networking Principles:
 The four principles that underlie the growth of
communication network services are:
• Digitization: There are two aspects to
digitization.
• First, any information-bearing signal can be
represented by a binary string with an arbitrarily
high degree of accuracy.
• Second, it is much cheaper to store, copy,
manipulate, and transmit a digital signal than an
analog signal, because advances in electronics have
made digital circuits much more robust and cheaper
than analog circuits.
Because of these two aspects, the overwhelming
majority of today's communication systems are digital.
• Economies of Scale:
• Communication networks exhibit scale economies.

11 • That is, the average cost per user of the network

declines as the network increases in size, measured
 Continued …
• Network Externalities:
• Externalities provide a powerful incentive for
internetworking.
• When two independent networks are interconnected,
the value to the users of both networks increases.
• The extra resources needed to implement the
interconnection are few if the two networks follow
compatible standards.
• The combination of network scale economies, which
reduce per user cost as the network grows, and
network externalities, which increase per user
benefits as the network grows, creates positive
feedback that can lead to an exponential growth in
demand and supply of network services.

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 Service Integration Continued …
• Economies of Service Integration: are
possible because communications
engineers now design services in a
modular and standardized way so that new
services can be introduced using existing
hardware and software modules.
• The widespread deployment of ATM, and
broadband access over cable TV and
ADSL, will facilitate service integration to
such an extent that one can imagine a
single network that will provide all of the
services that today are provided by
13 separate networks.
 2.3 Traffic Characterization and QOS:
 Traffic Characterization describes the
traffic that the applications generate as
well as the acceptable delays and losses
by the network in delivering that traffic.
The information that applications generate
can take many forms: Text, Voice, Audio
Data, Graphics, Pictures, and Videos
Moreover the information can be:
• One-way
• Two-way
• Broadcast or
• Multi-point

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 Continued …
We classify all traffic into three types.
That is a user application can generate:
• Constant bit rate (CBR)
• Variable Bit rate (VBR) or
• A sequence of Messages with different
temporal characterstics

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 Constant Bit Rate
To transmit a voice signal, the telephone network
equipment first converts it into a stream of bits
with a constant rate of 64Kbps.
Video compression standards convert a video
signal into a bit stream with a CBR.
For instance, MPEG1 produces a poor quality
video at 1.15Mbps and a good quality at 3 MBps.
For the voice or video application to be an
acceptable quality, the network must transmit
the bit stream with a short delay and corrupt at
most a small fraction of bits.
This fraction is called the bit error rate (BER)

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 Variable Bit Rate
Some signal compression techniques
convert a signal into a bit stream that
has a variable bit rate.
For instance, MPEG2 is a family of
standards for such variable bit rate
compression of video signals.
Messages
Many user applications on a network are
implemented by processes that
exchange messages.
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 2.4 Network (Communication) Services:
 Are:
1. Connection-Oriented Service and
2. Connectionless Service
1. Connection-Oriented Service
 Data handling involves using a specific path that
is established for the duration of a connection
 Connection-oriented service involves three
phases:
connection establishment,
data transfer, and
connection termination.
 During the connection-establishment
phase, a single path between the source and
destination systems is determined. Network
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resources typically are reserved at this time to
 Continued …
 In the data-transfer phase, data is transmitted
sequentially over the path that has been established. Data
always arrives at the destination system in the order in which
it was sent.
 During the connection-termination phase, an
established connection that is no longer needed is terminated
 It provides:
 Reliable, in-order byte delivery
 Flow control
 Congestion control
 Internet’s connection-oriented service is TCP (Transmission
Control Protocol).
 Applications using TCP: Email (SMTP), web browsing (HTTP),
and file transfer (FTP)
 Connection-oriented network service carries two significant
disadvantages over connectionless:
 static-path selection and
 the static reservation of network resources.
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 Connection-oriented versus Connectionless
Connectionless Services
 Data handling involves passing data through
a permanently established connection.
 It provides:
unreliable data transfer
no flow control
no congestion control
 Internet’s connectionless service is UDP
(User Datagram Protocol.
 Applications using UDP: streaming media,
video conferencing, and IP telephony.

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 Continued …
Connectionless service, however,
offers two important advantages
over connection-oriented service:
 dynamic-path selection and
 It enables traffic to be routed around network
failures because paths are selected on a
packet-by-packet basis.
 dynamic-bandwidth allocation.
 With dynamic-bandwidth allocation,
bandwidth is used more efficiently because
network resources are not allocated a
bandwidth that they will not use.
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 2.5 Network Elements
A Communication Network is a collection of
network elements interconnected and
managed to support the transfer of
information from a user at one network
location or node to a user at another node.
There are two principal network elements:
 Transmission links and
 Switches
 Telephone Apparatus

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 Continued …
A transmission link transfers a stream of bits from
one end to the other at a certain rate with a given
bit error rate and a fixed propagation time.
Transmission systems use four basic media for
information transfer from one point to another:
1. Copper cables, such as those used in LANs and
telephone subscriber lines
2. Optical fiber cables, such as high-data-rate
transmission in telecommunications networks;
3. Radio waves, such as cellular telephones and
satellite transmission;
4. Free-space optics, such as infrared remote
controllers.

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 2.6 Basic Network Mechanism
A network bearer services comprise the
end-to-end transport of bit streams, in
specific formats over a set of routes.
These services are differentiated by quality:
• Speed, delay, errors.
They are produced using five basic
mechanisms:
1. Multiplexing
• Multiplexing combines data streams of
many users into one large bandwidth
stream.
24 • Users thereby can share the large
 Continued …
2. Switching
• Switching allows us to bring together the
data streams of dispersed users.
• In telephone networks, a switch is
located in the central office.
• A link between two switches is called a
trunk.
• A link between a subscriber telephone
and a switch is called an access line or
subscriber loop.

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 Fig. A Basic Telecommunications Network
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 Continued …
3. Error Control: All transmission links
occasionally corrupt the messages they
transmit. It is therefore important for the
network to control such errors.
4. Flow control: is a mechanism that
enables the receiver to pace the
transmission of the source.

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 Continued …
5. Congestion Control: is a generic name for a set of
mechanisms designed to limit the rate or number of
packets introduced into the network by a source or a
switch. If the congestion control mechanism does not
function properly, an excessive number of may
accumulate in the switch buffers causing unacceptable
delay or loss.
6. Resource Allocation:
Because network resources (link bandwidth and
switch buffers) are shared by many applications at the
same time, resource allocation mechanisms must be
designed to ensure that each application receives the
necessary resources to maintain its quality of service.

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 2.7 Layered Architecture
An architecture is a specific way of
organizing many functions performed by a
computer network when it provides services
such as: a file transfer, e-mail, directory
services, and terminal emulation.
When protocols are arranged into layers, the
protocol entities of adjacent layers exchange
messages.
Once it gets a message, a protocol entity
performs some operations before it
transmits the message to the next protocol
entity.
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 Telephone Numbering
An international telephone connection from
any telephone to any other telephone is made
possible by unique identification of each
subscriber socket in the world.
In mobile telephone networks, each telephone
set (or subscriber card) has a unique
identification number.
The numbering is hierarchical, and it has an
internationally standardized country code at
the highest level.
This makes national numbering schemes
independent from each other.
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 International prefix
 An international prefix or international access number
is used for international calls.
 It tells the network that the connection is to be routed
via an international telephone exchange to another
country.
 The country code contains one to four numbers that
define the country of subscriber. Country codes are not
needed for national calls because their purpose is to
make the subscriber identification unique in the world.
 A telephone number that includes the country
code is called an international number and it has a
maximum length of 12 digits.
 The country codes have been defined by the ITU.

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 00 or 251 046 2207051
+

Fig. The Structure of The Telephone Number Hierarchy

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 Telecommunication Services
 In general, telecommunication services can classified into three
broad categories.
i. Basic Services
 Are services that everyone needs
 Ask cost

ii. Supplementary Services

 Additional services for ease of communication
 Provided without cost

iii. Value-added Services

 Additional services for effective communication
 Ask some cost
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2.1 Telecommunication System
Components
 All telecommunication networks are made up of five basic
elements that are present in each network environment
regardless of type or use.
 These basic components include:
 Terminals,
 Telecommunications Processors,
 Telecommunications Channels,
 Computers and
 Telecommunications Control Software.

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Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Terminals:
 Input / Output Devices

 Any input or output device that is used to transmit or receive data can be

classified as a terminal element.

 are the starting and stopping points in any telecommunication network

environment.
 Telecommunication processors:
 support data transmission and reception between terminals and computers
by providing a variety of control and support functions (i.e. convert data
from digital to analog and back).

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 Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Processors: modems, multiplexers, front-end

processors
Front- End Processor: minicomputer manages
communication for host computer
Concentrator: computer collects messages for
batch transmission to host computer
Controller: computer controls interface between
CPU and peripheral devices
Multiplexer: allows channel to carry multiple
sources simultaneously

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 Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Telecommunication (Communication) channels:

 are the way by which data is transmitted and received.
 are created through a variety of media of which the most popular

include copper wires and coaxial cables.

 Fiber-optic cables are increasingly used to bring faster and more robust
connections to businesses and homes.

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 Components of Telecommunication Networks Cont’d….

 Computers:
 In a telecommunication environment computers are connected
through media to perform their communication assignments.
 Early networks were built without computers, but late in the 20 th
century their switching centers were computerized or the networks
replaced with computer networks.
 Telecommunications control software:
 is present on all networked computers and is responsible for
controlling network activities and functionality.

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 Thank
You!
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