Engineering Encyclopedia

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Future Trends

Note: The source of the technical material in this volume is the Professional
Engineering Development Program (PEDP) of Engineering Services.
Warning: The material contained in this document was developed for Saudi
Aramco and is intended for the exclusive use of Saudi Aramcos
employees. Any material contained in this document which is not
already in the public domain may not be copied, reproduced, sold, given,
or disclosed to third parties, or otherwise used in whole, or in part,
without the written permission of the Vice President, Engineering
Services, Saudi Aramco.

Chapter : Communications
File Reference: CTE10109

For additional information on this subject, contact

J.S. Phillips on 873-0228

Engineering Encyclopedia

CONTENTS

PAGES

The Changing Nature Of User Services ....................................................... 1

Technologies Fundamental To Information Systems.................................... 2
Trends In The Communications Networks.................................................... 4

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THE CHANGING NATURE OF USER SERVICES

There are many ways of looking at future trends in telecommunications. While voice is still
the dominant service carried over today's systems, the increased demand for data services (up
to 25% per year) has resulted in users expecting much more from the present and future
communications networks. Figure 1 illustrates this tremendous growth in "non-voice"
demand. As shown in the diagram, data traffic currently accounts for over half of the circuits
used in a typical business network, with this percentage expected to increase steadily over the
decade of the 1990s.
Unlike telephone traffic, this non-voice service is also non-uniform in nature, and includes a
variety of data speeds, protocols, and interfaces. One of the major trends in communications,
for the 1990s, is the shift from "telephone network based thinking" to the definition of
communications as "a customer set of requirements that includes broadband channels."

100

Data

80
60
40

Percent of
Network
Traffic

Voice

20
1980

1990
FIGURE 1

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TECHNOLOGIES FUNDAMENTAL TO INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The rapid changes occurring in information systems (computers and communications) depend
mainly on three fundamental technologies:

Integrated circuits/microprocessors
Photonics or lightwave
Software

Integrated Circuits
Integrated circuits were first produced in 1959. For the next ten years, circuit complexity and
density doubled every year, a 1000-fold increase every ten years. In recent years this rate of
change has decreased to a doubling every 18 months, a hundred-fold increase every decade.
The known physical limit of today's IC technology is about one billion components per
individual device.
The processing capability of single-chip microprocessors, measured in "million instructions
per second" or MIPS, continues to double every year. These are used in large numbers in
modern telephone switches. The AT&T No.5 ESS, for example, networks nearly 3000
microprocessors to achieve a total processing power roughly five times greater than that of a
typical large mainframe computer.
Photonics or Lightwave
The earliest telephone systems were purely electrical in nature, from telephone set to
telephone set. The development of radio and microwave provided long-distance transmission
without the installation of copper cables. The difficulties of radio transmission, such as noise,
frequency coordination, siting and capacity, have been largely overcome through the use of
optical fiber cables. The information carrying capacity of fiber optic links has been doubling
every year, and systems are now in place that are capable of carrying 48,000 simultaneous
telephone conversations on one fiber pair. A data rate of 20 billion bits/second has been
demonstrated, and a single fiber ultimately has the potential of transmitting all human
knowledge ever recorded as text in less than one minute.

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It is expected that in the late 1990s there will be an introduction of all-photonic switching and
computing. In an optical circuit, beams of light pass through each other without interference,
unlike electrical circuits. This could lead to massively parallel computers thousands of times
more powerful than electrical computers in operation today. This processing power would
support artificial intelligence and "fuzzy logic" applications such as voice and pattern
recognition.
Software
The third basic technology involved in the management and movement of information is
computer software, either as revisable code or firmware. Like integrated circuits, software has
rapidly gotten larger and more complex. In 1965, the software used to control the first
electronic central office consisted of about 100,000 lines of code. Today, in the AT&T No. 5
ESS, that number is over 2 million, and a similar growth has occurred in PABXs and other
forms of control programs. Design automation and code generation programs, as well as
standard libraries of algorithms and routines, have done much to improve development speed.
However, software now accounts for over one-half the cost of developing a new telephone
switch.

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TRENDS IN THE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS

The overall network diagram introduced in CTE 101.01 is but one way to organize the
segments of a telephone network. A technology "cube" as shown in Figure 3 is frequently
used to illustrate trends and developments. In the technology cube, each block represents a
distinct market segment in which new products or developments are occurring.

Support Services

Telephone
Set
Loop

Telephone Switch

Network

FIGURE 2

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Network
Outside
Plant

Video
Data

Customer
Equipment

Voice
Switching

Transmission

Control

FIGURE 3

Customer Premises Equipment

The most important change in customer premises equipment has been the addition of
intelligence (memory, processing and input/output) to the telephone equipment. One simple
example of this change is the provision of a user-defined speed dialing list within a set, a
feature that a decade ago could only be provided from the telephone switch. It is not
uncommon to find telephone sets with other features as well, such as calculators, clocks,
radio/tape players and recording units. One drawback to these sets is that they generally
require local power to support these set functions.
The rapid growth of data transfer via dial-up telephone lines has led to the creation of a
variety of integrated voice-data terminals. Modems, either as external or internal computer
devices, allow personal computers to transfer data to and from other data devices. Concerns
about unauthorized computer entry has limited this form of computer access within Saudi
Aramco, but integrated voice-data terminals are used extensively in other industries and in
other locations. Facsimile machines, which are used to transmit images over the telephone
network, nearly always have a regular telephone handset and dial, which allow them to
double as a conventional telephone.

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It can be expected that these trends toward greater intelligence in customer premises
equipment will continue. This does not mean that the intelligence of the switching system or
network is decreasing. It simply means that certain features are becoming local features,
rather than switch or network features.
The telephone switch and network are expanding in capability at the same time. Modern
networks now have the capability of passing signaling information, such as the calling
number, all the way through the network for display on the set of the called user.

Switch

Network
Intelligence
Customer Premises
Equipment

FIGURE 4

Customer Premises Wiring

Customer premises wiring, in today's world, carries much more than telephone traffic. It is not
uncommon to find a mix of unshielded twisted pair (normal telephone wiring), shielded
twisted pair (data), coaxial cables, and even fiber optic cables (high-speed data) at a customer
premises. The early effort to integrate voice and data onto the same medium has, for the most
part, been rejected in favor of local high-speed transfer of data between terminals and
computers through dedicated local area networks (LANs) using token-ring, bus (contention)
or star (polled) architectures. LANs have proven to be cost effective, simple to modify and
change, and to possess greater data transfer capability than integrated voice-data networks.

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However, the difficulties of maintaining two or more separate wiring arrangements cannot be
expected to continue indefinitely. Systematic wiring systems, such as AT&T Premises
Distribution System (PDS), integrates voice and data distribution wiring plans. High-speed
data networks operating on fiber optics cables, such as the 100 mb/s Fiber Distributed Data
Interface (FDDI) technology, will have the potential for carrying both voice and data; only
time will tell if this approach will become a widely used method of voice transport.
The Telephone Loop
The trend in the outside plant loop can be summarized in two words: greater bandwidth.
Bandwidth means, in simplest terms, the information-carrying capacity of a communications
channel. As mentioned in CTE 101.03, this is limited to about 3000 Hz in the case of voice
communications. Special encoding techniques allow data modems to transmit up to 19.2 kb/s
over this analog channel.
Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN)
Efforts to expand this bandwidth have been made through a world-wide development of the
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) concept. ISDN is a data service, derived from
telephony, in which two 64 kb/s data channels (called bearer or B channels) and a 16 kb/s
signaling channel (called the delta or D channel) are combined on a single loop circuit to
provide high-speed data to and from the customer premises. As illustrated in Figure 5, ISDN
supports two separate channels, which can be used for simultaneous voice and data, two voice
circuits, or a single data channel at 128 kb/s. The major components of ISDN are the
following:

A terminal adaptor (TA) providing a limited set of standard interfaces for customer
premises equipment
Network terminating equipment (NTE) providing loop termination and testing
capability
ISDN line cards providing loop transmission and the switching interface
A digital telephone switch with ISDN control software and ISDN signaling
capability
C7 signaling with ISDN capability between network switches
A digital transmission network supporting end-to-end digital services

It can be argued that ISDN is a network service rather than a loop feature. However, ISDN is
aimed at the long-standing obstacle of proving greater bandwidth to the "last mile" of the

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telephone network, i.e., the customer loop. As expected, ISDN requires special electronics,
such as echo cancelation devices, to provide high data rates on the outside plant cables.

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analog
trunk

AT

Digital
Central
Office
A

analog line

B
digital

TA

NT

DT

sig

2 mb/s
30 ch
digital link
C7 signaling

Digital
Central
Office

DT

sig

I A

144
kb/sec
ISDN
line

analog

AT

trunk

I
144 kb/sec ISDN line
2B+D

B
NT

TA
B

analog telephone
Grp IV Fax
64
B kb/s

TA
NT
DT
AT
sig
B
D
A
I

Terminal Adaptor
Network Terminator
Digital Trunk
Analog Trunk
Signaling link
Bearer (64 kb/s)
Delta signaling (16 kb/s)
Analog line card
ISDN line card

line
144 kb/sec ISDN line

NT

TA

2B

2B+D
144 kb/sec ISDN line
2B+D

NT

TA

LAN

FIGURE 5

Fiber Optics Loops

The 64 kb/s channels promised under ISDN will improve data transfer rates, but it is
recognized that this will be too little (and maybe too late) to meet the growing demands for
data transfer within companies. Many companies are exploring the possibility of providing
fiber optic loops from the switching center to the homes and business locations. The dramatic
increase in bandwidth that would result from this change would allow many new services to
be introduced, such as cable television, interactive video and picture phones, very-high-speed
data transfer, etc. The reality of "telecommuting" could be realized in such a scenario.

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There are difficulties with fiber optics loops, however; some of these are:

Cost. Although the cost per conductor-mile of fiber is now equal to that of copper,
there is greater cost associated with fiber optics terminals, i.e., the providing of signal
injection, detection, and conversion.

Maintenance. The difficulty of building and maintaining multi-conductor fiber cables

to provide a dedicated fiber to each home remains a difficult problem. Splicing is a
much more difficult process for fiber optics than for copper conductors.

Power. The electronics associated with the fiber optics cables will require separate
electrical power. This power must be supplied from the switching center via separate
copper conductors, or locally at each customer premises location. Central power
requires complex cable design; local power eliminates the advantage of "common
battery," which permits telephone service to operate independent of other systems.

Most researchers are concentrating on a shared fiber (similar to FAP designs discussed
earlier) with fiber taps for each home served by a cable. There are many design challenges in
this approach, such as the providing of separate channels on the fiber for each home with
appropriate filters to assure privacy and security.
Some companies are implementing fiber optic cables to interconnect their buildings for data
transfer in a Wide Area Network (WAN) arrangement similar to LANs discussed earlier. The
FDDI design is capable of extending over 100 km in total length, to provide this type of
expanded service. WANS are being extended, through packet switching nodes, to form
Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). WANs and MANs rely heavily on fiber cables due to
their high bandwidth requirement. MANs, as defined in IEEE 802.6, will utilize a full duplex
queuing procedure for data packets known as dual-queue dual bus (DQDB) data protocol.
Switched Networks

Circuit Switched
The major trend is switching is, as mentioned before, in the support of greater bandwidth.
Support of ISDN is only the initial effort in this direction. The means of switching at a higher
hierarchy of the transmission multiplex in a form of Synchronous Transfer Mode (STM) is
being developed. Digital Access Cross-Connects (DACS) provided limited functionality in
this regard. New switching capability in this area is known as Synchronous Optical

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Networking (SONET) in the USA, and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) within the
CCITT.

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PABX Versus Central Office Switching

A major decision faced by many companies is whether to provide central switching or local
switching for a group of buildings or business locations. In the U.S., centralized switching
provided by a telephone company owned central office is called Centrex service. Centrex
service is provided by dedicating a section of the telephone switch to a single user, and the
provision of PABX-like features to those subscribers.
Centralized service provides economies of scale in capital expenses, maintenance and
operations, but requires additional outside plant to provide a dedicated cable pair to each
phone requiring service. Centralized switching also represents a "single point of failure"
affecting a large segment of company operations. Obviously, each design case must be
analysed on its own merits. Overall in the telecommunications industry, the trend is towards
local switching through PABXs.

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Local/Wide Area
Networking
Connectionless

Random
CSMA
Deterministic
Token-Ring
DQDB

Metro Area/Public
Networking
X.25 Datagram

Packet
Transfer
ConnectionOriented

Circuit
Switched

Asynchronous
Transfer Method
Synchronous
Transfer Method

IEEE 802.3
IEEE 802.5
FDDI
IEEE 802.6
SMDS

X.25 Virtual
< Frame Relay >

ISDN-B

SONET (US)
SDH (CCITT)

Digital: ISDN-N
Analog: Voice

FIGURE 6

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Packet Switching
Packet switching is a data service separate and apart from voice networking. It involves the
division of a data "message" into smaller segments, referred to as packets or cells, and the
transmission of these packets through a common transmission network. Data packets may
follow a defined path (virtual circuilt), or can include a terminating address and take an
arbitrary path (datagram). LANs, such as CSMA "Ethernet" defined in IEEE 802.3 and tokenring networks defined in IEEE 802.5 fall into this category of packet switching, as does FDDI
wide area networking, MANs (IEEE 802.6) and public data networks (CCITT X.25).
Future services in the area of packet switching include Switched Multimegabit Data Service
(SMDS) in the USA, and broadband ISDN under the direction of the ISDN. Frame relay, a
method of encoding many different forms of packets for network transport, will be the
method of accessing broadband ISDN. For the most part these high-bandwidth data networks
will operate separately from voice networks, but will share transmission facilities.
Synchronous transfer modes (STM), however, would allow voice to be transported along
with data packets.
Network Monitoring and Control
The major trend in the area of network monitoring and control is one of integration. To a large
extent, monitoring systems have been developed as vendor-specific systems, integrated with
the equipment they support. There is great difficulty and cost in developing a comprehensive
system to replace these individual systems. The alternative being developed and adopted is
the use of an overlay system to integrate the various inputs and outputs into a single monitor,
display, reporting, and control system, as illustrated in Figure 7. Major vendors in this area
are IBM with its Netview products, AT&T with its Universal Network Management Architecture (UNMA), and DEC with Extended Management Architecture (EMA).
Network management functions can be divided into traditional areas, new areas, and
emerging areas, as shown in Figure 8. Truly integrated network management will be a longterm elusive goal. For the time being, efforts are being made to provide syntax consistency
and interoperability between network management data bases.

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Separate Communications Systems

Having Stand-Alone Vendor Provided
Network Management Systems

Single Umbrella Network Management

System

vendor

vendor

vendor

vendor

vendor

switching

transmission

switching

transmission

facilities

vendor
facilities

vendor

vendor

vendor

vendor

LANs

etc.

LANs

etc.

Single Integrated Network Management

System

transmission

switching

LANs

facilities

etc.

FIGURE 7

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Traditional Areas of Network Management

Maintenance
Management

System
Performance

Facility
Assignment

Service Order
Processing

Physical resources
Logical resources
Assignments

Problemdetection
Problem isolation
Problem diagnosis
Problem bypass
Problem recovery
Statistics tracking
Problem prevention

Usage statistics
Response statistics
Availability
Cost

Additions
Changes
Removals
DA/Billing

New Areas
System
Management

Future Areas
Security and
Directory Information

Planning
Interfaces

Sub-unit problem

diagnosis

Unattended

operation
"Lights-out"
operation
Software management
Load control

Capacity planning
Network configuration
Routing analysis
Contingency planning

Disaster recovery
Security analysis
LAN directory
LAN administration

FIGURE 8

Reviews and Written Evaluation

This concludes this module. There are no exercises or a written evaluation associated with this
module.

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