RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SUB-SYSTEM OF A TELECOMMUNICATIONS SWITCHING PLATFORM

摘要

A telecommunications switching system with a hardware resource manager system. The resource manager interfaces with higher-level system functions such as call processing, OA & M, NMS and system control functions and with lower-level hardware functions embodied in an input/output sub-system (IOSS) containing various hardware resources for interfacing the switching system to other entities. The resource manager controls all interactions between the IOSS hardware and the higher-level functions and hides the hardware specifics of the IOSS, giving the higher-level functions a hardware-independent view of the IOSS resources. As a result, the higher-level functions can operate without modification with a wide variety of IOSS hardware configurations. The resource manager manages the physical interfaces and IOSS resources and is aware of the complete configuration of the IOSS, including all channel addressing information and the state of each IOSS resource. The interfaces between the resource management sub-system and the higher-level functions utilize distributed objects. The resource manager uses the configuration and state information from the IOSS to model each hardware component and communications channel as a managed object, which managed objects are used in the object-oriented interfaces with the higher-level functions of the switching system. Resource characteristics and statuses are available to the higher-level functions as attributes of the resource models. Method calls are provided to manipulate the objects for such operations as loading, testing and controlling the states of the various modeled hardware resources.