11. Reading IS-41 Rev B standard

Why reading (ANSI-41) IS-41 Rev B protocol standard for TDMA is good? This document was written for 2G wireless network protocol, but they’re talking about 5G developments out there.

This standard was written by many top engineers from many telecom companies around the world, i.e. well reviewed and written.

This document was well documented and structured.

A section described the interaction of many telecom elements such as MSC, HLR, and RBS. It was written at high level for an ease of understanding with enough details. Thus readers didn’t get lost in details, but focused on the key features.

Each feature is separated in a chapter, i.e. easy to search for an interested feature.

One of the last section listed details of a protocol message with all parameters in bit and byte. This was a good reference chapter.

If you’re developing a system with a programming language similar to PLEX-C of Ericsson, you could view a subsystem as an element in IS-41 Rev B such as MSC or HLR. Therefore, you could build a dispatch interface (similar to an API) for other subsystems to access internal functionality of this subsystem. This would help to encapsulate this subsystem. If you optimize this subsystem for some reasons, but remain the dispatch interface unchanged, other subsystems don’t need to be updated.

The goal to read this standard was to learn how to write a good document for a protocol application.