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By
Sergio Pellizzari
and
Walt Bowers
The edge of the access network at one time simply involved reaching an end customer with a copper pair or a coax cable. Access equipment then became a little more complicated being through a DSLAM, CMTS, or other inside plant technologies, but the intelligence and complexity effectively remained in the service provider premises. Reaching a customer and managing the end-user experience was still achieved through management of simple termination points, and service guarantees were achieved through the inherent connectivity of the network.
Today and as we move into the future, access equipment lives on the edge, in the hands of the consumer. It is a piece of telco-owned or consumer-owned gear residing on the customer premises that is managed (at least partially) by the service provider. These devices include more intelligence to allow the operators and cable companies to provide a richer set of services to the consumer. Set-top boxes, DSL/Cable modems, broadband home routers, femtocells, and LTE assets: all are examples of service provider owned and managed devices that reside at the edge—on the consumers premises rather than being exclusively under direct physical control of the service provider.
The certainty is that more and more types of edge devices are being developed and their complexity is skyrocketing. These devices will be managed, monitored and configured by the service provider and that management needs to be remote, scalable, and secure. Management systems need to evolve to be capable of managing the scale and complexity of these devices. TR-069 has been used as a starting point for edge device configuration but we need to move beyond it’s capabilities and there are so many more devices that do not support TR-069 yet require similar management capabilities.
As the intelligence on these edge devices continues to increase, their importance to the service provider continues to increase as well.
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Today’s management systems need to manage the hardware edge device domain AND the applications platform middleware domain. |
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Therefore, the remote management of these edge devices, and the applications and services operating through them, becomes essential to the service provider’s success. A critical question that is very challenging to answer would be: “Which devices in my network do not follow a defined ‘Gold Standard’?”
Traditionally, vendors that do not follow new paradigms in network management expect operations staff to log onto every device, navigate the GUI or command line interface, manually inspect the parameter settings and determine compliance of many parameters to the gold standard. At which point, each parameter for each device is manually checked off a master list of devices to record the fact that inspection has been completed on that device. This process clearly falls well short when it comes to dealing with large numbers of parameters or devices, and a system that automates these process steps becomes mandatory for operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
What if a new version of software needs to be deployed to those edge devices? The equipment vendor has likely provided a suitable manual procedure, and a large document is available to allow operations staff to step their way through the upgrade process for a single device at a time.
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- These devices become the key gateway and control element of the home network.
- Service providers introduce new home network based services and applications to generate additional revenue.
- Therefore, these edge devices also become the “application platforms” for the service provider to introduce new revenue generating applications.
- Finally, the broadband battle between telcos and MSOs moves from a “most bandwidth wins” battle to a “win the home network, win the subscriber” battle.
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One device completed, 99,999 devices to go. Edge devices that are deployed in large numbers need special consideration for functions like service activation, upgrades, backups, security, etc. These functions must be managed by OAM systems in such a way to allow large numbers or groups of devices to be acted upon together, en masse.
New edge devices such as home gateways, plug computers, and set-top boxes are becoming even more interesting, because many are integrating software-based application platforms such as OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) to provide enhanced device intelligence and additional feature rich services.
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