The Mobile Service Support system (MSS), which Ericsson AB develops, handles the setup of new subscribers and services into a mobile network. Experience from deployed systems show that traffic monitoring and control of the system will be crucial for handling overload situations that may occur at sudden traffic surges. In this paper we identify and explore some important control challenges for this type of systems. Further, we present analysis and experiments showing some advantages of proposed solutions. First, we develop a load-dependent server model for the system, which is validated in testbed experiments. Further, we propose a control design based on the model, and a method for estimation of response times and arrival rates. The main contribution of this paper is that we show how control theory methods and analysis can be used for commercial telecom systems. Parts of our results have been implemented in commercial products, validating the strength of our work
