TROPICO-RA O&M and quality assurance

A description is given of the main quality assurance procedures carried out for TROPICO RA during the project and the O&M (operations and maintenance) facilities. TROPICO RA is a switching system designed to fulfil all international quality of service recommendations. For this purpose, TROPICO RA´s project life cycle has many procedures for quality assurance to design hardware and software items within a specified quality level. The quality of service can be divided into reliability and grade-of-service requirements. TROPICO R structure (first element of the TROPICO family of switching systems) is highly reliable as it was designed for graceful degradation and load sharing. TROPICO RA uses the same design philosophy and incorporates new solutions in order to improve the reliability performance. The grade-of-service requirements of TROPICO RA have been extensively evaluated for its specified traffic capacity. To validate these requirements during operation, the system is always measuring and recording traffic and performance data. It is able to give instantaneously any information needed for traffic flow control and routing decisions. These important O&M functions are performed without using call-processing resources