Switching Office Research Articles

Improving blood pressure control, organoprotection and metabolic disorders correction in patients with hypertension switching from diuretic-based combinations to fixed combination lisinopril + amlodipine + rosuvastatin

The aim of the study was to assess the possibility of fixed combination Lisinopril + amlodipine + rozuvastatin to improve arterial elesticity in patients with hypertension and high pulse wave velocity, despite previous diuretic-based combination antihypertensive therapy. Materials and methods. In an open, observational study duration of 24 weeks was included 60 patients on previous diuretic-based combination antihypertensive therapy. All participants underwent 24-hour blood pressure monitoring, applanation tonometry (augmentation index and central blood pressure), pulse wave velocity measurement, laboratory tests (lipid profile, fasting glucose, insulin resistance index - NOMA), leptin, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein before and after the switching to a fixed combination of lisinopril + amlodipine + rosuvastatin. Results. According to measurements of office blood pressure switching of patients on double combinations based on diuretics to a fixed combination of lisinopril + amlodipine + rosuvastatin, a further decrease in systolic blood pressure (SBP) by 13.7% and diastolic BP (DBP) by 18.8% was observed. According to the ABPM, the decline in the average daily SBP was 15.8%, DBP - 22.5%, average SBP - 16.2%, DBP - 19.8%. The combination of lisinopril + amlodipine + rosuvastatin reduced PWV by 15.9%, augmentation index by 13.5%, central SBP by 8.4% (p

Novel Automatic Service Restoration Technique by Using Self-Reconfiguration of Network Resources for a Disaster-struck Metro-Access Network

This paper shows the concept of the elastic lambda aggregation network (EλAN) that will achieve an elastic common access infrastructure for the metro-access network. It proposes a service restoration technique that uses optical path switching and intercentral office handover for EλAN to recover from disasters. The feasibility of the proposed service restoration technique is successfully demonstrated for the first time by using a prototype testbed of a metro-access network. By applying both orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and adaptive modulation, the system automatically changes the transmission parameters (modulation level, the number of subcarriers, and symbol rate) according to the service requirements and conditions of the optical distribution network, such as the link's end-to-end optical loss, in order to achieve accommodate multiple services. In the experiment, an optical network unit in a faulted system automatically reconnected within 10 s to another office 20-km away with the same throughput.

The Best Conference You Never Attended [White Hot

The IEEE International Communications Energy Conference (INTELEC). INTELEC has a long history that predates PELS. INTELEC was the brainchild of several Bell Labs engineers who realized the need for such a conference. The first INTELEC was held in 1978 under the auspices of the IEEE Communications Society. INTELEC continued as an annual conference at host cities all over the world. In 1991, INTELEC was transferred to PELS. T he issues a nd themes of INTELEC have evolved over the years. In the 1970s, the papers were often about the newfangled switch mode rectifiers. In the 1980s, the papers were often about the evolving distributed power architectures used in telecom equipment. In the 1990s, a key topic was powering the network as the transmission medium evolved from twisted-pair copper wires to coaxial cable and optical fiber. In the 2000s, much of the discussion focused on powering the far-flung equipment of cellular telephone networks. In today's network, with all traffic, whether voice, video, or data, being digital, the differences between data center, telephone switching office, mobile base station, and telephone central office are blurring and dissolving. The power needs of such a network are rapidly evolving. How we manage and design the power systems and converters for these new networks is the key focus of INTELEC today.

Same-Firm Audit Office Switches and Informationally Motivated Opinion Shopping

We investigate the potential for a client to use a same-firm office switch as a mechanism for audit opinion shopping, relying on the framework developed by Lennox (2000). Opinion shopping in this context could either be informationally motivated (Dye 1991) or driven by managerial opportunism. Using U.S. data from 2000-2017, we find that client companies successfully avoid going concern audit opinions through audit office-switch decisions. More importantly, we find that successful office-level opinion shopping is more prevalent among low bankruptcy-risk client companies. We also find that successful opinion-shopping companies tend to choose audit offices with low Type I errors, and they exhibit higher subsequent earnings quality than non-successful counterparts. Overall, the evidence suggests that same-firm audit office switching is not opportunistic, but is primarily informationally motivated and improves audit quality.

Atoms and Bits: Rethinking Manufacturing

An Interview with Neil GershenfeldNeil Gershenfeld talks with Jim Euchner about the Internet of Things and the coming revolution in manufacturing.Neil Gershenfeld is a pioneer in understanding the boundary between the digital and physical worlds-how objects become data in the network and how data in the network become objects. The technology from his lab, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, has been seen and used in a wide variety of settings, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the World Economic Forum to rural Indian villages and innercity community centers. In this interview, he discusses the true nature of the Internet of Things, how distributed fab labs can enable anyone to make almost anything, the power of global knowledge sharing with innovation at the nodes, and the future of manufacturing using digital materials.JIM EUCHNER [JE]: The Internet of Things has become quite a buzzword. I think you define it more precisely than some do. Can you give your definition-what is the Internet of Things and what is it not?NEIL GERSHENFELD [NG]: Sure. I was part of a group that started what became called the Internet of Things. A decade or so ago, a group at MIT was working on embedding Internet protocols into devices and showing that, with a few hundred bytes of code and a dollar a part, you could implement a minimal IP stack. That meant that individual devices could talk to the Internet. So the simplest statement about the Internet of Things is that it means IP embedded in devices.A lot of the things called Internet of Things today are really BITNET of Things, and they're being done by people who don't understand the difference between the BITNET and the Internet. They are ignorant of the underlying architecture. There are a few core architectural principles that make the Internet work that you can apply to embedded devices. After 10 or so years, we've had to reconnect the future with the past concerning those architectural principles.BITNET was a connection of mainframes, and it was a very high barrier to entry. To expand the BITNET, you needed to add another mainframe, and that was a large investment that was centrally managed. Users used terminals connected to the mainframes. It was similar to the old phone system: what a telephone did was defined not by the phone but by the central office switch. Adding a new central office switch was a big investment. One of the core principles that led to the Internet was the concept of what was called end-to-end, which roughly means that what the Internet does is defined by what you connect to it.The Internet transports packets; it uses a common representation for those packets. At the time it was emerging, there were many dissimilar networks, and the Internet settled on a common representation that could travel across them. But the Internet is really defined by what you connect to it, not by its physical construction. The Internet could grow by adding things to the edges, not by changing what was at the center. That enabled people to invent instant messaging and VoIP and video streaming and search engines, not by changing the architecture of the Internet but by innovating at the edges.Now the reason so many of the things called Internet of Things are actually the BITNET of Things is that people think in terms of devices, like a light sensor or a thermostat or a switch, connected to a server that proxies its state to build an application. Manipulation of the sensor can be done through the Internet, but the state of the switch or the light is not contained in the switch or light, it's contained in the remote server. That means that to change the function of the device, you have to change the remote thing, not the local thing. You can't innovate at the edges because you need access to the central controller.To be the Internet of Things in my definition, the light or the switch has to be a full-fledged citizen of the Internet. …

Design and Implementation of Fire Multi-Level Menu for Office Automation Platform Based on Communication Technology

With the social development and progress, fire institutions, including colleges and universities, including office automation platform, which the functions needed to support the business more and more, need to use multilevel menu for management platform. In addition, with the rapid development of mobile Internet technology, people access to office automation platform approach is also increasingly diverse, due to the hardware and software configuration of various access devices larger difference, which requires multi-level menu office automation platform consumes fewer resources simple operation, good scalability. Now, we use the idea of finite state machines to achieve a small footprint, scalability, simple switching office automation platform colleges Fire multi-level menu management system.

Disaster-resilient networking: a new vision based on movable and deployable resource units

During the great east Japan earthquake on March 11, 2011, a lot of ICT resources - telecom switching offices, optical fiber links, and so forth - were completely or partially damaged due to the tremor and the resultant tsunami. As a consequence, the demand for ICT services explosively increased, mainly because the people of the affected areas were trying desperately to communicate with the outside world that led to a phenomenal rise in the network traffic. In the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) East Corporation alone, 385 telephone offices stopped operating immediately following the earthquake because of power outages and disruption of facilities. Approximately 1.5 million users were cut off from using fixed-line telephone service. The demand for fixed-line and mobile telephone services jumped up to 10-50 times the usual. This gave rise to serious traffic congestion, and the emergency ICT networks and services could not deal with this issue sufficiently. This article proposes a network architecture that is resilient even through devastating disasters by effectively exploiting specially designed movable and deployable resource units, which we refer to as MDRUs. An MDRU having the ability to accommodate communication and information processing functions can be rapidly transported or moved to the disaster zone, and can be deployed within a reasonably short time to establish the network at the disaster site and launch ICT services. The concept and configuration of the network architecture based on the MDRU and its features are described in this article. Some preliminary simulation results are also reported to evaluate the performance of our adopted MDRU-based disaster resilient network.

Dr. Hiroshi Inose's pioneering contributions to digital switching systems and his outstanding leadership in informatics

The idea of time slot interchange (TSI), the fundamental concept of implementing time switches in digital switching systems, was first conceived by Dr. Hiroshi Inose, then at the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1957 while he was a visiting consultant at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The TSI collects each subscriber's pulse code modulation (PCM)-coded voice information to be stored into a small time interval (time slot), and then aligns multiple time slots on a common transmission bus to constitute a repetitive frame. The TSI enables any time slot to be interchanged with another time slot within a frame once the time slots in the frame are buffered in memories. Thus, TSI gives the time switch functionality equivalent to N-input by N-output space switch functionality. He built a prototype digital time-division multiplexing (TDM) electronic switching system called CAMPUS, which is based on the TSI principle, using a magnetostrictive delay line as a memory device. TSI received little attention until the end of the 1960s because memory devices were very costly. However, with the rapid advancement of semiconductor technologies in the 1970s, the TSI scheme became more widespread. TSI was first commercially deployed in 1976 as the time switch of AT&T's no. 4 ESS, the world's first stored-program control time-division switching system. Since then, TSI has been used in almost all digital central office switching systems and digital private branch exchanges (PBXs). Dr. Inose's contributions were not limited to research on such things as switching systems, PCM integrated communications, computer communications, and road traffic control systems; he was also actively involved in a number of Japanese governmental and international activities in the area of communications and information processing technologies. His final work was the establishment of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in 2000, Japan's sole comprehensive academic institute in the field of informatics that seeks to advance integrated research and development activities in information-related fields.

Developing a Telecommunication Operation Support Systems (OSS)

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened competition in the telecommunications market in the U.S. and forced the incumbent telecommunications companies to open both their physical and logical infrastructure for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). In this case study we focus on the problems that face a CLEC with regard to designing an information system and getting a back office system, called an Operations Support Systems (OSS), operational in a highly competitive, complex, fast-paced market in a compressed time frame when a change in a critical telecommunications network component, namely the central office switch, is made after 75% of the system implementation was completed. This case deals with the factors that led to this change in central office switches, its impact on the IT department, its impact on the company, and the alternatives considered by the IT department as possible solutions to the many problems created by this change.

Network Planning of Broadband Wireless Networks

To deploy broadband networks, service providers, such as competing local exchange carriers, need robust plans for providing various types, amounts, and locations of services at competitive prices. Broadband networks generally consist of an access component (wireless access), a concentration component (a wireless aggregation point or hub), a service routing or distribution component (a central office or metro switch), and various combined or separate distribution components (a long-haul backbone data or voice network). Because access, aggregation, and routing or distribution vary greatly in requirements, we developed a method and platform for planning the components of fixed-wireless-broadband (FWB) systems for local loop access. We have helped various service providers to analyze and design many networking scenarios using our methods. The service providers have used these scenarios and their predicted financial outcomes to plan FWB access networks tailored to meet their marketing and financial goals. By implementing our method, one service provider has improved its planning process, achieved a competitive advantage in its markets, and increased its annual service revenues by tens of millions of dollars.

A Heuristic Search Algorithm for the Cellular Telecommunication Network Expansion Problem

This article proposes a very effective heuristic algorithm to address the network expansion problem, and it discusses step-by-step procedures of the proposed algorithm in detail. The input to the algorithm is based on a binary integer programming formulation of the network problem. The solution specifies the connections of each component, cell sites, hubs, and mobile telephone switching office and satisfies the redundancy requirements for each cell site to ensure the traffic flow and to backup any disconnection. The algorithm generates lower and upper bounds on cost of the exact solution, and preliminary testing indicates that it generates very effective results efficiently. The authors hope that in presenting such an algorithm, designers of very large cellular network expansions will have a tool to obtain significantly good solutions in a reasonable time.

Developing a Telecommunication Operation Support Systems (OSS)

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened competition in the telecommunications market in the U.S. and forced the incumbent telecommunications companies to open both their physical and logical infrastructure for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). In this case study we focus on the problems that face a CLEC with regard to designing an information system and getting a back office system, called an Operations Support Systems (OSS), operational in a highly competitive, complex, fast-paced market in a compressed time frame when a change in a critical telecommunications network component, namely the central office switch, is made after 75% of the system implementation was completed. This case deals with the factors that led to this change in central office switches, its impact on the IT department, its impact on the company, and the alternatives considered by the IT department as possible solutions to the many problems created by this change.

Designing Partially Survivable Cellular Telecommunications Networks

In a cellular telecommunications network, a mobile telephone switching office (MTSO) co-ordinates the activities of the mobile units either directly or via intermediate base transceivers or hubs. I...

VoIP Security: Not an Afterthought

Voice over IP (VoIP) promises to up-end a century-old model of voice telephony by breaking the traditional monolithic service model of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and changing the point of control and provision from the central office switch to the end user’s device. Placing intelligence at the edge, in the Internet tradition, has a number of consequences: a wider community of developers - in particular the large community of Web service developers - can work on voice applications; open interfaces and decomposable functionality facilitate multi-vendor and homegrown solutions; and open source and nonproprietary software development can facilitate innovation and experimentation.

FPGA technology to minimize extended life-cycle development

This letter discusses the concept of utilizing field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology to manage long-term (20-year-plus) lifecycle costs associated with central office (CO) switches. The tremendous advances in the underlying technology make a cost-effective transition possible in both a software-transparent and customer-impact-transparent manner.

Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Infrastructure in Rural America: Measuring the Digital Divide

guishing features of the new economy. Telecommunications companies currently offer a wide range of products from caller ID and call forwarding, to video teleconferencing and high-speed Internet access. The number of telephone access lines in the United States, deployed by major carriers report annually to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), increased by 32% between 1990 and 2000, from 119.8 million to 157.6 million lines. Over the same period, the number of these lines equipped to provide ISDN-a highspeed, communications technology-increased from 13.6 million to 129.6 million, which represents a jump of 850% (Federal Communications Commission). ISDN, or Integrated Services Digital Network, is defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee as a network that provides end-to-end connectivity to support a wide range of services, including voice and nonvoice (Kessler, p. 2). ISDN technologies, applied to copper or fiber optic phone lines, allow for the transmission of multiple channels of information (e.g., voice, fax, data, and video) over a single wire. Depending on the specifics of the ISDN technology (e.g., type of phone line, characteristics of the central office switch, etc.), lines are upgraded to offer ISDN can transmit information at speeds ranging from 128 kilobits per second to over 150 megabits per second. Benefits of ISDN include highspeed data transmission, videoconferencing, enhanced ability to multi-task, and greater clarity in voice calls. Motivated by the increasingly advanced (digital) telecommunications services play in the new economy, this paper investigates the investments in ISDN infrastructure made by major telecommunications carriers in rural areas across the United States. Specifically, we examine the recent (1999) status of ISDN investments in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States, and we measure the digital in ISDN deployment between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas for each year between 1996 and 2000. Although, at the present time, other technologies are beginning to replace ISDN as the technology of choice, ISDN played an important role in bringing technology to telephone networks during the time period analyzed in the study (Greenstein and Spiller, 1996; Malecki and Boush). We believe the patterns of ISDN investment and the divide uncovered in the study may apply to other forms of telecommunications infrastructure available today and in the future.

Local competition in telecommunications in the United States: Supporting conditions, policies, and impacts

The telecommunications landscape is very different from the days of the national monopolies. Deregulation, coupled with technological change, has affected the types of telecommunications, the providers of service, and the availability of various service bundles. This paper looks at one dimension of the new landscape: the facility-based investment by new providers in metropolitan areas in the USA. New providers include those who target high-volume business customers as well as the more widespread wireless service. A data set comprising central office switches permits analysis of the location and the type service provision by the new telecommunications competitors in American cities.

Performance analysis of switch access systems

The public Internet and corporate intranets have been growing at a phenomenal rate in recent years. Today, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the most common mechanism for accessing the Internet and intranets from home. Thus, much of the data traffic is transported through traditional switch access systems. Until recently, traffic engineering for these switch access systems has been based on traffic models consisting predominantly of voice traffic. The current explosion in the amount of data traffic — with differing traffic characteristics — being transported by traditional switching systems may have an adverse impact on the grades of service (GoS) unless engineering rules are modified to account for the new traffic characteristics. While this issue is important for central office switches and inter-switch trunking, it is even more important for relatively smaller access concentrators. This paper compares simulation and analytical models that help in engineering such systems for a mix of traffic.

Optical Interconnect Cabling for Next Generation Central Office Switching

Conventional interconnect cabling is inadequate to handle the terabit speed requirements of switching and routing in the Central Office. In this paper, we propose a solution of parallel optical channels that consist of a flat ribbon cable, with 24 multimode fibers and a special matching 24-pin fiber-array connector that feeds 12 VCSE transmitters and 12 receivers. The 24-fiber flat ribbon design provides greater fiber density and smaller bend radius than conventional cables. In addition, the 24-fiber flat ribbon meets all environmental tests.

Speaker verification for authorizing updates to user subscription service received by internet service provider (ISP) using an intelligent peripheral (IP) in an advanced intelligent network (AIN)

A method for controlling subscription services delivered to a user by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) coupled to an Automated Intelligent Network (AIN) telephone system with at least one central office switching system. An intelligent peripheral subsystem is connected to the central office switching system, via a call connection channel. The intelligent peripheral subsystem providing at least one auxiliary call processing capability via the call connection channel and provides a telephony speaker authentication method for selectively authorizing updates to user subscription services types provided by the ISP, wherein each of the subscription services types include one or more service options. The method for controlling subscription services including: a) prompting for a voice response; b) authenticating a user's voice response pattern by performing a speaker-dependent cepstrum matching algorithm with previously stored samples of the user's voice response, and if the user's voice response pattern is positively authenticated with previously stored samples, then performing the steps of: c) presenting a menu of user subscription types, each with available AIN service options; and d) responding to a user selection of at least one user subscription types, each with service option, by activating a service option selected by the user, wherein the service option is governed by said ISP by regulating one or more Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses received by a user subscriber device from said ISP over a telecommunication line.