Design considerations for multiple systems

The major design goals for MSC are to minimize resource consumption by defining suitable connections between the systems, balance resource demand by distributing functions among systems to obtain acceptable performance, and to program design considerations for multisystem conversational transactions.

The design and tuning recommendations that apply to a single IMS system are applicable to each IMS system in an MSC environment. Resource demand and consumption are taken into account when defining systems that are part of an MSC configuration.

An IMS transaction that is processed in a local system uses the same hardware and software resources that it would in a non-MSC environment. Transactions that are processed in a remote system require additional resources. In addition to resources used to transmit the transaction over physical links to the remote processor and to receive the response from the remote processor, resources are needed for message queuing and logging. Performance considerations are directly related to minimizing the resources consumed by remote processing and balancing the resource demand between several processors in an MSC configuration.