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automated to the greatest extent possible. Sophisticated analysis and reporting tools will also have to be part of such a solution, in order to allow operators to prioritize resources and maintain control over the various automated and manual processes.
The first step in this direction is a unified mediation layer, based on which many of these other capabilities are made possible. Once this layer is in place, the OSS tools can evaluate network events and other data in the context of the entire network topology, enabling intelligent automation of root-cause analysis. With an end-to-end network view and unified mediation layer, the most likely cause can be identified even if the corresponding alarm has yet to be received.
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The first step in this direction
is a unified mediation layer, based
on which many of these other capabilities
are made possible. |
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with the proliferation of VNOs, there is an increasing number of service providers who do not own their own infrastructure. Since VNOs generally do not have access to much of the network data, they’ll be required to closely monitor customers and services at their end of the network. They'll rely on data such as CDRs, active probes, and basically many of the features that have been added to OSS beyond the original network management systems to create the end-to-end solutions mentioned above.
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This level of automation can have a major impact on fault resolution speed, bringing root-cause identification to near real time, but it is still essentially a reactive process. It is now possible to actually move forward and proactively predict service degradation in many cases and prevent it before it actually occurs, largely due to the fact that most degradation these days is related more to traffic congestion than faulty hardware. This proactive capability can be achieved by the integration of a rich variety of data resources through the unified mediation, including both fault and performance data. This includes sources such as CDRs, probes, and data from network elements. With this data, traffic patterns and other customer-generated KPIs and KQIs can be analyzed, and thresholds created based on historical information which can alert operators before the subscriber notices anything.
Looking forward, the next step will be to automate the corrective action process up to the single session level. However, this is expected to become viable for implementation only a few years from now, due to technological and psychological drawbacks.
Beyond the physical changes in network infrastructure, another important trend is that
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Additionally, they’ll need to monitor traffic at the other end, between themselves and their infrastructure provider, to ensure that inter-partner SLAs are kept. In fact, this aspect of QoS monitoring will soon have to encompass more than just a VNO and its infrastructure provider. The business environment is already shifting towards a multidimensional landscape, with several layers of providers (infrastructure, services, VNOs, and other third parties), and VNOs are aware that they often share their infrastructure provider with other VNOs as well. The many SLAs set throughout this environment target various QoS levels and often can be defined in different terms. In order to manage their rights and obligations as virtual entities with limited access to network data, the key here will be an emphasis on solutions with robust and flexible data manipulation. The OSS will have to allow the operator to define their own KPIs and KQIs to match each SLA, and to obtain the maximum amount of information that can be derived from the available data resources. In the future, there will likely be additional data sources created for VNOs as this trend continues and demand increases.
At the same time, the incumbents who own the infrastructure have their own challenges.
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