Implementation of the 3-Tier architecture using COM+ Sudatel Billing System

Abstract

An increasing number of applications is developed. These applications which support the researcher in management and analysis of data often contain parts which can be found in other applications in a similar form. To save time and development effort, existing components of other applications could be reused when a new application is developed. A module which is used for the composition of a new application should consist of the business logic, the database and the component interface. Sudan Telecom (Sudatel) billing environment was used as a case study in this thesis and it was running the following 2 billing systems: BCC 1000: developed in-house, deployed in regional Sites and Supporting 144,000 subscribers. BCC 2000: developed in-house, deployed in Khartoum and some regional sites supporting 248,000 subscribers. Both above mentioned billing systems was built on 2 – Tier Architecture (MS-Access as Front-End and SQL Server as Back-End) On the other hand, the problem arises when the performance of the existing billing systems is largely affected by the number of concurrent users, resulting in a major impact on transaction processing time. We used 3-tier architecture as a solution , usually the three tier architecture is used when an effective distributed Client/Server design is needed that provides (when compared to the two tier) increased performance, flexibility, maintainability, reusability, and scalability, while hiding the complexity of distributed processing from the user. These characteristics have made three layer architectures. The goal of this thesis is to implement a 3-Tier Architecture billing system using COM+ technology as a middleware to resolve the performance bottleneck and benefit from the 3-tier architecture features, the solution (case study) was implemented in Sudatel and the reengineered (3-Tier) billing system is supporting 560,000 subscribers.