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54
COMMUNICATIONS
EVOLUTION OF NGN/IMS AND POST-NGN NETWORK
MANAGEMENT MODELS
Alexander B. Goldstein,
Federal Bonch-Bruevich Telecommunication University
St. Petersburg, Russia,
agold@niits.ru
Keywords: OSS/BSS; business intelligence, post-NGN, multi-agent system, queuing network, network management.
In today's conditions of the telecommunication paradigm shift and the technical progress in the information and communication industry which dramatically accelerated in the 21st century, new approaches, models and methods for managing promising info-communications are needed [1].
With such revolutionary changing and radically more complicated object of management, the ineffectiveness of the extensive development of previous models and methods of managing info-communications is obvious. They also condition the attraction of completely new models and methods, such as multi-agent self-organizing systems and cognitive management models based on them. Management of communication networks - in accordance with the law "On Communications" - is a set of organizational and technical procedures aimed at ensuring trouble-free and coordinated operation of the communication network, including the traffic control, monitoring and control of the status of network elements, transport network channels and node interactions, as well as the management of the operation of applications and provision of new information and communication services.
The goal of this paper is to provide a new telecommunications network management model that will be adequate to the modern and future NGN/IMS and post-NGN telecommunications networks instead of traditional OSS/BSS approaches.
Information about authors:
Alexander B. Goldstein, Ph.D. Federal Bonch-Bruevich Telecommunication University St. Petersburg, Russia
Для цитирования:
Гольдштейн А.Б.. Эволюция моделей управления сетями NGN/IMS и пост-NGN // T-Comm: Телекоммуникации и транспорт. 2017. Том 11. №6. С. 46-50.
For citation:
Goldstein A.B. (2017). Evolution of NGN/IMS and post-NGN network management models. T-Comm, vol. 1 1, no.6, pp. 46-50.
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I. Introduction
!n today's conditions of the telecommunication paradigm shift and the technical progress in the information and communication industry which dramatically accelerated in the 21st century, new approaches, models and methods for managing promising info-communications are needed [1].
With such revolutionary changing and radically more complicated object of management, the ineffectiveness of the extensive development of prev ious models and methods of managing inlb-communications is obvious. They also condition the attraction of completely new models and methods, such as multi-agent self-organizing systems and cognitive management models based on them.
Management of communication networks - in accordance with the law "On Communications" — is a set of organizational and technical procedures aimed at ensuring trouble-free and coordinated operation of the communication network, including the traffic control, monitoring and control of the status of network elements, transport network channels and node interactions, as well as the management of the operation of applications and provision of new information and communication services.
II. OSS/BSS in the management of telecommunication
networks
When translated into the engineering language, this means that communication network management systems are designed to support the operational activities of telecommunication Operators. They include, first of all, NRl (Network Resource Inventory) systems, systems of Fault Management (collection and processing of alarm messages), Trouble Ticketing (elimination of various faults), Fraud Management (Fight Against Frauds), Performance Management (performance management). Order Management (management of orders for connection and provision of serv ices), etc. included in the symbiosis of two fundamental integrated systems: Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) [2].
Operations support systems cover a set of business processes which are required by the telecommunications Operator to provide, monitor, analyse and manage the telecommunications network; for monitoring and troubleshooting; to organize an interaction with a user. In a point of fact, the support of operations includes everything implied by the historically established term of communication network management - control and management of network elements.
Business support systems cover technologies which are necessary to a service provider needs in order to maintain relationships with customers, partners and suppliers.
The border between the operations support and business support is blurred: business support functions are customer-oriented subset of operations support. Business support processes, for example, when receiving an order from a customer for a new service, should flow into operations support processes in order to configure the resources which are necessary to provide this service. Therefore, support systems are often designated as OSS/BSS systems.
The first OSS/BSS systems, as showed by author's historical researches, were written in 1951 in the English company J. Lyons, engaged in tea, ice cream and confectionery. They included applications of Inventory, Order Management, and so on. Results of accounting and transactions were compared with plans and budgets. The hardware for this application was also created in J.
Lyons - this was the business version of the EDS AC computer, developed at Cambridge University, later it was called LEO. As the result, there was obtained a real-time OSS/BSS system w ith the business information processing and the decision making support, which many Operators envied even today [3], There are also other historical versions of the OSS/BSS originating.
Directly in telecommunications, operational software systems appeared in the mid-70s of the last century and were written, as a rule, in little-known programming languages such as the recommended ITU-T language CillLL and arranged on specialized electronic control machines (ECM), similar to large universal computers (mainframes). Just as it was in the Intelligent Network (IN) model of the early 1990s of the last century, such technologies of centralized technical maintenance at the mainframes led to the creation ofTMN architecture, and then more complex OSS/BSS systems and other initiatives of the Telemanagement Forum.
N1. Stages of evolution of approaches to the network
management
Evolution of the network management can be traced through standards already mentioned in the previous paragraph: the OS1 communication network management model, the Internet governance model, the TMN architecture, TMF models and standards. Goals and nature of the management systems vary in the course of this evolution. Fig. I shows three stages of the evolution of telecommunications network management systems.
Originally, OSI standards, IETF models and ITU-T M series recommendations were based oil the Manager-Agent concept, as shown in Fig. 1 (a). The managed element in the Manager-A gent model is represented by a specific set of the information called the Management Information Base (MIB). The next phase of evolution in Fig. 1(b) corresponds to the further development of the TMN concept. The modern paradigm of building telecom management systems in accordance with the latest developments of the TMForum is presented in Fig. 1(c). This paradigm is thoroughly discussed in a variety of publications [2J. Modern versions of OSS/BSS systems of the world's leading vendors correspond to it loo. Some remaining open issues of such management systems are researched in this dissertation. But mentioned above re(e)volitional transformations in the information and communication industry continue to take place and are increasingly accelerating, conditioning the necessity of the similar revolutionary transformations in management systems successively according to changes of paradigms a), b) and c), and then taking them further to the right beyond these three paradigms in Fig. 1 to the not yet specified paradigm d), the one of possible approaches, to which this article is devoted to.
The scientific range of problems of telecommunications management originated with the advent of powerful program systems of the centralized management and technical operation (CMTO) of the 1980's style. Theoretical basis for it was the classical theory of management systems, created as early as the end of the XIX century and developed to such engineering applications exactly at that time. This classical theory of management systems is oriented primarily to management objects, characterized by certain determinism, oper-ability, stationary, relative simplicity, fixed coordinates, the sufficient know ledge state of characteristics, the possibility of constructing regular mathematical models. Such characteristics were completely matched by then existing telecommunication networks with the circuit switching, including also mathematical network models for computing resources by means of queuing theory.
(a) Moment MeHeA*ep~ AreHT
(6) Moflenb TMN
?
(B MoAËflb Ei'OSS Framev^rx
(b) Moflen l. ynpaoneinfl nocT-NGN
Fig. I. Evolution of approaches to the management of info-communicátions from simple "manager-agent" structures
to complex distributed structures
Accordingly, for the synthesis of management systems, structural mathematical modelling and formalized methods were used by them on the basis of representations of the state space, vector-matrix calculus, methods of the operations research and the theory of the optimal management. Such management systems are described by stovepipe (chimney) or silo (bunker) models with relatively low coordination between subsystems, as shown in Fig. la) and b). The main attention in the thesis is given to models shown in Fig, 1c) and corresponding modern NON/IMS télécommunication networks. They will inevitably lead to the new paradigm in Fig. Id), corresponding to the future post-NGN information and communication networks. Scientific disciplines, attracted to the study of the as yet unspecified paradigm in Fig. I d) are based 011 the self-organization phenomenon.
Self-organization and multi-agent systems are considered within the framework of the analysis of telecommunications management as the scientific discipline. The concept of the management strategy correctness at some moments of time and always, i.e. at all moments of the considered period time, as well as approaches to the mathematical modelling of the telecommunications management is compared.
In the field of management systems, self-organizing systems were first described by U.R. Ashby in 1959, where the self-organization was defined as a process, in the course of which a complex system organization is created, reproduced or improved [4]. Applying above concepts of self-organization processes to telecommunications management systems, considered in this article, it is possible to fill with concrete senses global external influences, connected with introducing new telecommunication technologies, creating new information and communication services (and demand for them), the gross adds of subscribers (or their loss), the traffic jitter, the redistribution of the frequency resource, etc., as well as the final targets, which in our industry are customarily formulated in terms ofCAPEX, OPF.X, QoS, SLA, etc.
IV. Approaches to mathematical modelling
of telecommunications management systems
Mathematical models, used to study management systems in modem telecommunications networks can be divided into two classes.
The first class of such models, the most numerous and deeply worked out, is based on results of the theory of queuing networks (the theory of queues). This apparatus is actively used by the author of this article too (along with many hundreds of colleagues), for example, in management models of requests chaining mechanisms in IP/MPLS tunnels [5]. Recent researches of the author are based on the latest theory of so-called G-networks of queuing [6].
The second class of models is based on multi-agent systems -more new area of analysis and modelling of telecommunications management processes, in comparison with the previous class, which become increasingly important, as far as the modern info-communications are drastically complicating, and the number of parameters in management models increases. Models of such multi-agent systems, compiled by teams of interacting independent agents, are considered, in particular, in [7].
Here, the comparative description of approaches to the mathematical modelling of these two classes, involved into the thesis, is proposed too. And here this description and the comparison itself will be carried out to study extremely simplified telecommunications management scheme, and therefore the material of this section can be considered as the introduction to a deeper study of more complex telecommunication network management schemes, presented in the next section.
For this extremely simplified management scheme, only one question is studied: how results of servicing requests for telecommunication services depend on strategies of managing resources of the telecommunications network. Probabilistic-temporal characteristics of servicing requests for various telecommunications services are calculated taking into account the probabilistic nature of various telecommunication resources, provided by the network at each moment of time t. The output data of models will be the numerical values of some generalized service quality index QoS (Quality of Service) at specified PTC requests for telecommunication services and telecommunication resources for services being released by the time of their arrival.
In these simplified models, two scenarios are considered: with immediate real-time recruiting of newly released resources to service incoming requests (that improves the resource usage
ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ МОДЕЛЕЙ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ СЕТЯМИ NGN/IMS И ПОСТ-NGN
Гольдштейн Александр Борисович, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет телекоммуникаций им. М.А. Бонч-Бруевича, Санкт-Петербург, Россия, agold@niits.ru
Аннотация
Целью данной работы является создание новой телекоммуникационной модели сетевого управления OSS/BSS, соответствующей требованиям сетей NGN/IMS и пост-NGN.
Ключевые слова: OSS/BSS; пост-NGN; мультиагентные системы; теория массового обслуживания; управление сетью. Литература
1. Гольдштейн Б.С., Кучерявый А.Е. Сети связи пост-NGN. Санкт- Петербург "БХВ-Петербург" 2013.
2. Самуйлов К.Е., Чукарин А.В., Яркина Н.В. Бизнес-процессы и информационные технологии в управлении современной инфокоммуникационной компанией. М.: Альпина Паблишерз, 2015.
3. Гласс Р. Креативное программирование 2.0. СПб.: Символ#Плюс, 2009.
4. Эшби У.Р. Введение в кибернетику. М.: КомКнига, 2006.
5. Гольдштейн А.Б. Модель управления туннелированием в сети IP/MPLS // Информатизация и связь, № 1, 2015.
6. Gelenbe E., Fourneau J.N., G-networks with resets, Performance Evaluation, 2002, vol. 49, pp. 179-192.
7. Гуревич Л.А., Вахитов А.Н. Мультиагентные системы // Введение в Computer Scienœ. 2005.
Информация об авторе:
Александр Борисович Гольдштейн, к.т.н., доцент, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет телекоммуникаций им. М.А. Бонч-Бруевича, Санкт-Петербург, Россия
