DISTRIBUTED CONTROL OF AIN AND NON-AIN SWITCHES AND RESOURCES IN AN ADVANCED INTELLIGENT NETWORK

摘要

An apparatus for use in an advanced intelligent network (AIN) (10') having a service control point (SCP) (14'). The apparatus includes a number of functional components "abstracted" into a control hierarchy including a rules engine (22), one or more enhanced service applications ES (24), one or more intelligent peripheral controllers, and a set of intelligent peripheral adapters. The rules engine supports one or more rules for use in provisioning an enhanced service according to the enhanced service application. Each enhanced service (ES) application translates each rule required by the application into a set of one or more application level service primitives for its associated IPC (26). The IPC, in turn, translates each application level service primitive into a set of directives to control each intelligent peripheral adapter (IPA) connected to the IPC. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, an IPA translates each IPA directive into actual hardware instructions for controlling a particular switch or resource.