An information model for intelligent network services

Data in the intelligent network will be distributed, and in part replicated, amongst the component nodes of the network; this distributed database provides support for network-wide control and management. The ability to reallocate and restructure the data is essential in order to meet the needs of changing network characteristics and new service functionality. The paper describes a highly structured view of the intelligent network database. The data is classified as a set of entities and relationships between these entities are identified, using the entity-relationship method. The motivation for constructing this model is that it should serve as the basis for methodically producing a clean design of the database. Such a design should be resilient to changes in the physical components, and should also be able to accommodate new service functionality. It will be seen that a single simple model is sufficient to represent both the real-time service information requirements and the service management information requirements