Telecommunications: An Introduction for Software Professionals - Softcover

Tomlinson, Clive

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201674734 ISBN 13: 9780201674736

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 2000

Synopsis

(Pearson Education) A guide for the software professional just starting out in telecommunications. Provides a broad understanding of telecoms, from top level business processes to the techniques used in telecom software. Cuts through the jargon with clear explanations, to the heart of telecom technology. Softcover.

About this title

About the Author

Clive Tomlinson has worked for over twenty years as a telecoms software engineer and systems architect,developing, supporting and managing software technology for packet data networks, circuit switched voice networks, and their management systems. Using experience gained through working with many of the world's largest telcos, equipment vendors and software companies, Clive presents a lucid high-level account of telecoms technologies, the structure of the industry, and the special software methods that it uses.

Clive is a regular speaker at technical conferences, and the author and presenter of a number of telecoms training courses.

0201674734AB04062001

From the Back Cover

baffled by unfamiliar technology and jargon. This book will provide you with a broad understanding of telecoms: from the top level business processes, through the network technologies, down to the special techniques used in telecoms software. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to work and communicate effectively in all areas of the industry.

This book covers:

· The telecoms market: who the players are, their goals and challenges,

and how software engineering companies operate in the market
· Telecoms network architectures and transmission principles
· Transmission systems, including wireline, optical fibre, multiplexing,

mobile comms, WAP and UMTS
· Circuit mode switching: signalling systems, telephony switches and

intelligent networks
· Internet architectures, IP and voice-over-IP
· Telco business processes and operations
· Telecoms network and business support systems
· Telecoms software languages and techniques

This book:
· Cuts through telecoms jargon and explains things simply and clearly
·Provides a broad, comprehensive coverage of telecoms technology
· Introduces the key software aspects of telecoms systems

About the author…

Clive Tomlinson has worked for over twenty years as a telecoms software engineer

and systems architect,developing, supporting and managing software technology

for packet data networks, circuit switched voice networks, and their management

systems. Using experience gained through working with many of the world's largest

telcos, equipment vendors and software companies, Clive presents a lucid high-level

account of telecoms technologies, the structure of the industry, and the special

software methods that it uses.

Clive is a regular speaker at technical conferences, and the author and presenter

of a number of telecoms training courses

0201674734B04062001

From the Inside Flap

Preface

This book is intended to help software professionals to practice in the telecommunications industry. Telecoms is technologically dominated by software and is therefore an industry that is acutely hungry for the services of capable software people. However, if someone with only a general IT background goes into a telecoms company, what he hears is often baffling, as Figure 1 shows. This may strike the software generalist with awe, which would be a pity, because actually the particular ideas in the picture are quite simple. But there is a genuine obstacle to be overcome. Telecoms networks involve a truly mind-boggling array of inter-operating technologies. The field is so laden with jargon that unless the software person has an understanding of a wide range of technologies, he or she has little hope of communicating with the telecoms engineer. Consider the example of Figure 1. To make sense of that requires a grasp of switch-routing heuristics, internet mobility, cable TV networks, third-generation cellular networks, transmission systems, provisioning and traffic management. Happily, a grasp is all that is needed. To work effectively with telecoms engineers, you do not need to know their job anything like as thoroughly as they do. Some parts of telecoms technology are particularly software-intensive, and in those parts, the software professional may need something more than a superficial understanding. But by and large, a little well-selected knowledge can go a long way. The aim of this book is to give the reader a wide-ranging understanding of the telecoms industry, right the way from the top-level business processes, through the network technologies, down to the special techniques used in telecoms software. Armed with that understanding, a capable software person should be able to communicate intelligently with telecoms engineers. This book does not replace the many complete and detailed specialist technical texts available. This is a generalist work. It is deliberately light on detail, but it covers most of the areas with which a telecoms software engineer is likely to have to contend. Once this book has got you started, you can go on, if you will, to immerse yourself in the detailed technical works. I am a software engineer, and I assume that my reader is one also. But a software background of undergraduate level is more than enough to make sense of what follows. Finding your way around Telecoms is a complex tangle of technologies and businesses, and to make it understandable we have to cut it up into easy chunks. Figure 2 shows how this book carves up the subject. It is just one of many possible ways of doing this, but I have chosen it to present the material in a sequence which will be least confusing for the reader. To get an appreciation of why telecoms engineering is such a lively business, we start in Chapter 1 by looking at the telecoms market: who the players are, how they get their revenues, what their goals and challenges are, and so on. This is a technical book, not a market analysis, but we need to share some idea of what is going on in the market so that we can appreciate the significance of the technologies on which this book focuses. Chapter 2 introduces some architectural models to help you understand the structure of telecoms networks, and some basic transmission principles. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are a CookÕs tour of transmission systems, starting with fixed bit transports such as optical fibre, then mobile technologies like UMTS, and ending up with the complex multiplexing systems which make the bit transports usable. Chapters 5 and 6 are a similar tour of circuit mode switching systems, starting with the signaling systems that define the protocols to make the bit transports meaningful, then looking at the more ordinary telecoms switches (telephone exchanges), and lastly the intelligent networks switching technology. Chapters 8 and 9 explain the IP data communications technologies that support the Internet. The applications of these technologies are then reviewed, in particular the World Wide Web and internet telephony. Chapters 10 and 11 then explain the kind of business processes that go on in a telco, and the computing systems that they need to support them. Lastly, Chapter 12 discusses the half dozen software techniques that have evolved to suit the telecoms industry's special needs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201674734
• ISBN 13: 9780201674736
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224