A RELIABLE TELECOMMUNICATION NETWORK INCLUDING TELEPHONE EXCHANGES AND DATABASES

摘要

Operation of telephone exchanges requires access to substantial amounts of data that are held on databases on servers. In telecommunication networks, each data base serves several telephone exchanges in a client-server relationship. The data stored on the databases is identical and updated infrequently. The invention is based on the realisation that it is possible to provide the exchanges with more information on the overall system architecture than is possible in conventional client-server relationships because the number of exchanges served by the databases is known and fairly static. The invention provides a telecommunication network including a plurality of telephone exchanges and identical databases. Each telephone exchange is adapted, at a given time, to access one database and has information specifying the address and status for each database in the telecommunication network. For each telephone exchange, the accessed database is selected on a dynamic basis by that exchange.