Private ENUM based number portability administrative system evaluation

Abstract

Number portability is a telecommunications service allowing users to change the service provider, service type or location and retain the telephone number. A variety of number portability implementations exist within the public telephone network. A demand for a unified solution to number portability arose with the accession of a packet based telephony. ENUM offers a translation mechanism between the telephone number and the Internet identifier thus presents a global solution to the number portability. In this article we evaluate the ENUM-based number portability administrative system. We propose a private-enum based, hierarchical management system using DNS zone transfer for database update. We compare the efficiency of currently most deployed Web Service number portability system with the Enum-based solutions using BIND and PowerDNS name servers. BIND performs the best independently of the data source, be it a zone file or a database.