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Not only do provisioning systems assign network and home device resources (VLAN, Service Access Point, set-top-box, residential gateway) with default configuration (QOS and ACL) as their traditional role dictates, but they are now required to provision policy management and control functions as well as application middleware with subscriber profile, their service entitlements and select predefined governing policies. Once this initial end-to-end provisioning process is complete, the subscriber’s first interaction with the network is controlled by the policy manager who will remove registration portal redirection, allocate IP addresses to subscriber devices, set the appropriate upstream/downstream QOS/ACL corresponding to the overall computed policies required for each of the services selected and start metering the service as directed by the subscriber profile. This division of labor between provisioning systems and policy control systems results in a simpler provisioning model that can keep up with the scale, dynamics and breadth of new service creation, and even reducing time to market, costs and risks.
Some service modifications such as adding new hardware devices or resources to a subscriber profile or changing the network attachment point when a subscriber moves to a new address will require the involvement of the OSS provisioning systems. However, many on-demand triggers evoked by subscribers, the network or the applications result in dynamic network provisioning by the Alcatel 5750 Subscriber Service Controller (SSC); a policy-based management and control system:
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"This division of labor between provisioning systems and policy control systems results in a simpler provisioning model that can keep up with the scale, dynamics and breadth of new service creation, and even reducing time to market, costs and risks" |
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Home Device Modification Trigger
Each time a home device boots-up, a new policy can be applied to cover cases such as home device replacement, device portability and device spoofing. Using the policy manager to govern these minor subscriber changes simplifies the provisioning process while keeping the network free from fraudulent access.
Usage-Based Trigger
Subscriber usage can be metered and policies applied when certain metering thresholds are exceeded. For example, a user could receive an e-mail notification that its usage has reached 70%. At 100%, the user is redirected to a captive portal to select a top-up for the remainder of the month or continue with best effort service.
Time-Based Trigger
Timer expiry could change the policy based on time-of-day, time based promotional offers or additional bandwidth for an elapsed amount of time (temporary upgrade). In these cases the network policies would be automatically adjusted to their “normal” settings once the timer has expired.
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On-demand service admission control
For dynamic applications such as Video-On-Demand (VOD) requiring a sizable amount of bandwidth that is highly variable over time depending on subscriber demand, service providers must implement a control system that will notify capacity planning systems that subscriber demand is crossing some configured capacity thresholds and reject new application sessions under extreme load to ensure that existing sessions do not suffer from network congestion. Another reason for applying service admission control is to allow revenue prioritization across similar services that might be under promotional offers. In IPTV for example, a policy could allocate free VOD a maximum of 30% of the overall available VOD bandwidth. The admission control’s knowledge of the total available network capacity in the first, second, third and fourth miles will be used to grant or deny network access to the application.
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Application or Network Event Trigger Applications or network events can contact the policy manager to request that a new policy be implemented. For example, policy managers can implement an immediate QOSbandwidth boost ensuring high quality of experience for on-net or partner applications like online movie previews accessed by subscribers. This scheme can be implemented via DPI (to detect application initialization request) or by having the application request new connectivity parameters from the policy manager. Another common usage of application-driven triggers is to redirect a user to a captive portal should security breaches such as worms, virus or denial of service attacks be reported by deep packet inspection (DPI) systems.
Subscriber Portal Modification Trigger
Having a policy manager controlling the network configuration in real-time allows many
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