i) Call origination from mobile :

• Signaling System 7 (SS7) is an international telecommunications standard that defines how network elements in a public switched telephone network (PSTN) exchange information over a digital signaling network.

• Nodes in an SS7 network are called signaling points. SS7 consists of a set of reserved or dedicated channels known as signaling links.

• There are three kinds of network points signaling points: Service Switching Points (SSPs), Signal Transfer Points (STPs), and Service Control Points (SCPs).

• SSPs originate or terminate a call and communicate on the SS7 network with SCPs to determine how to route a call or set up and manage some special feature. Traffic on the SS7 network is routed by packet switches called STPs.

• SCPs and STPs are usually mated so that service can continue if one network point fails. SS7 uses outof-band signaling, which means that signaling (control) information travels on a separate, dedicated 56 or 64 Kbps channel rather than within the same channel as the telephone call.

• Historically, the signaling for a telephone call has used the same voice circuit that the telephone call traveled on (this is known as in-band signaling).

• Using SS7, telephone calls can be set up more efficiently and special services such as call forwarding and wireless roaming service are easier to add and manage.

ii) Inter MSC hand off:

• Handover mechanism is extremely important in cellular network because of the cellular architecture employed to maximize spectrum utilization.

• Handover is the procedure that transfers an ongoing call from one cell to another as the users moves through the coverage area of cellular system.

• One way to improve the cellular network performance is to use efficient handover prioritization schemes when user is switching between the cells.

• Some advance schemes namely, guard channels, call admission control and handover queuing are utilized. All these of prioritizations schemes have a common characteristic reducing the call dropping probability at the expense of increased call blocking probability.

• Efficient prioritization scheme accommodates a number of new calls while guarantees the quality of service (QOS) of handover call. This idea is based on the neighboring cells have an overlapping (the area served by more