Telecommunication Signaling Analysis Using Connectionist Learning

Since the divestiture in 1983, AT&T has offered its business customers a verity of service alternatives to meet customers' specific telecommunication needs. For these services, signaling such as supervision and address signaling takes place between the network switches, the 4ESS(TM) and the 5ESS(R), and the Customer's Premise Equipment (CPE). However, CPEs are manufactured by a variety of vendors, each vendor tends to use a different signaling setup. In order for AT&T to process calls properly, the signaling setup at the customer's CPE must be compatible with the network switching systems involved. Therefore, signaling analysis knowledge is required to identify the options which are permissible given the type of customers' CPE and the specific services requested. However, information acquisition for each CPE is a non-trivial job. Problems arise when the CPE vendors are reluctant to release proprietary information about their products, or the provisioning processing experts have different opinion about different types of equipment due to their experience and background.