TABLE OF CONTENTS A mobile switching center (MSC) is a busy place, with processors, switches, speech handlers, and other equipment handling calls coming from dozens or hundreds of base stations. [1] Each component must have the capacity to handle the workload for all its various tasks. In this chapter we look at each logical component and enumerate its tasks, laying out the picture of what needs to be done to estimate capacity for each component of the MSC.
[1] The term MSC is used ambiguously. Sometimes it refers to the central switch and its processor, and other times it refers to the entire building and all its contents.
The MSC is a telephone switch that has extra responsibilities for the wireless part of the wireless telephone system. The main processor of the MSC is the computer processor that figures out what the switch should be doing. The processor itself has to have enough computing power to do everything the MSC has to do. Therefore, let us go over the functions that the MSC main processor has to perform, and let us keep our eyes open for how much workload each presents. These functions include call processing, providing short message service (SMS), and managing handoffs.
The call-processing workload for the MSC processor is on a per-call basis. Once we estimate the number of calls the MSC has to handle, we have a handle on the amount of computation the processor has...
