Telecom Services
Abstract:
Architectural Solutions and approach for implementation of Common
Management Information Protocol for Telecommunications Management
Networks.
Today, Carriers face several challenges typical of such a major
undertaking, including the variety of equipment, vendors, and protocols;
service software not being integrated with network
management;
the need for a reasonable service deployment lead
time;
and the costs, reliability, and performance issues
associated with the manual components of network management.
An Integrated Service Management Solution from Aaramb offers an
enterprise wide service and network management system, based on
open systems interconnection (OSI) model, that integrates the management
of new technologies (ATM, SONET) and legacy systems for long-distance
division.The system is designed to interfaces with customer systems
and other common carriers through standard interfaces.
Features:
distributed and fault-tolerant architecture
high performance integration of object-driven database technologies
facilitation of rapid development of new service and business applications
through foundation-block-reuse
resource-independent network management
common management information service interface between managing
applications and network elements, including legacy simple network
management protocol (SNMP).
hierarchical scalability.
The customer management system allows customers to access and update
their billing and subscription-related information from across the
Internet.
Objectives
address diversity by wrapping elements in a standard protocol
integrate services to network management while maintaining flexibility
through a standards-based information architecture
produce a unified application architecture for broadband that can
be extended to other legacies
use object technology to reduce deployment lead time
The telecommunications industry has historically relied on advanced
technology to provide solutions to complex problems. Legacy systems
have proliferated in this drive for new technologies, in turn driven
by the need to be competitive.
The victor in this newly created competitive environment was the
company who can provide the most value in the eyes of its customer.
Value could be in the form of new products and services or increased
customer care. Support of the business systems made the value reality.
This is the situation faced by most long distance phone companies.
Not only do companies have a large legacy environment to deal with,
they find themselves facing the monumental task of offering service
to local markets or risk losing market share.
Distributed technology solutions are essential to future system
development, but decisions to go this route are deffered considering
the cost associated with applying new technology to a mission-critical
application.
Objectives
To construct an architecture that meets long-term business and technical
objectives
To construct a system that scales to support thousands of users
To build an application, based upon the architecture, to consolidate
the functionality of several legacy order entry and management systems
provide integration with provisioning and billing systems.
To enable Internet solutions in support of customer direct policy.
A software architecture best suited for this problem domain would
be defined by a component-based layered architecture as referenced
in the Logical Architecture Layers diagram. With the components
in the higher layers being constructed through the assembly of components
in the lower layers. Defining the architecture in this manner simplifies
the construction of complex components while maximizing the reuse
potential of any specific application component.
Logical Architecture Layers
The architecture specification prescribes the logical organization
of the applications and describes the manner in which higher level
components were constructed from and the way it interacts with components
at the lower levels in the proposed architecture.
The User Interface layer of the architecture would be responsible
for implementing the interface between the application, its components,
and the system’s user. Specific implementations of the User
Interface could be made to bind the operations that are needed for
physical implementations such as Motif, Interactive Voice Response,
Visual Basic, and so forth.
The Application Services layer of the architecture would
be responsible for starting and configuring the application, and
managing the lifecycle services of any Business Process components
with which the application interacts.
The Business Process layer of the architecture shall contain
components that implement a separate business process (such as ordering).
The components in this layer would be responsible for managing the
lifecycle of the components it contains, the business rules that
dictate the use and behavior of those components, and the interaction
with any external system or data store required to store or retrieve
the information managed by the component.
The Business Concept layer of the architecture would contain
components that are shared among the various business process components.
Examples of components in this layer would include Customer, Enrollments,
Bill, Billing Plan, etc. These components would contain the business
rules that govern the information contained within its context.
They would be responsible for the lifecycle of the components they
contain.
The Business Foundation layer of the architecture would
contain classes that are common to the components in the business
concept layer. Examples of components in this layer include phone
number, address, location, contact, and so forth.
The Technical Foundation layer of the object would contain
classes that are common to any business domain.
The Technical Infrastructure layer of the architecture would contain
classes that comprise the infrastructure services needed by all
applications. This includes persistence, security, transport, and
so forth.
The architecture alone is not always enough to guarantee success.
The organization of the team and the software development process
being used are critical to any project’s success. Core issues
being
the assessment and planning of the application via use cases
domain models, and analysis models,
the actual design and construction of the components.
In an approach case, a general design would be created in which
the components that defined a vertical slice of functionality would
be designed and implemented. In areas where changes are expected
(such as transport mechanism), layers of abstraction would be added
to facilitate the future change. Once the vertical slice was implemented
and refined, the process would then replicated for the other system
components.
This approach results in small, modular components that were
easy to design, implement, debug, and understand, significantly
reducing the overall development time of projects. It also enables
people with very little experience in object-oriented programming
to produce solid code within a few short days.
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