Performance analysis and overload control of an open service access (OSA) architecture

Abstract

The trend of the service architectures developed in telecommunications today is that they should be open in the sense thatthey can communicate over the borders of different networks. Instead of each network having their own service architecture with their own applications, all networks should be able to use the same applications. 3GPP, the organization developing specifications for the 3G networks has specified the standard Open Service Access (OSA), as a part of the 3G specification. OSA offers different Application Protocol Interfaces that enable an application that resides outside a network to use the capabilities of the network. This paper analyses the performance of an OSA gateway. It is examined how the overload control can be dealt with in a way to best satisfy the operators and the 3'rd parties. There are some guiding principles in the specifications, but a lot of decisions have to be made by the implementors of application servers and OSA gateways. Proposals of different requirements for an OSA architecture exist such as, minimum amount of accepted calls per second and time constraint for the maximal total delay for an application. Maximal and fair throughput have to be prioritized from the 3'rd parties view, but profit is the main interest from the operators point of view. Therefore this paperexamines a priority based proposal of an overload control mechanism taking these aspects and requirements into account.