Optical Networks Find OSS

Optical equipment and fiber have long been used in the network core to provide very high bandwidth from one point to another. Because fiber optics was mostly used in point-to-point communications, network management and other software issues weren't all that complicated.

Today, many optical functions are moving out from the core toward the edge and into metropolitan access. In fact, a September 2000 research report published by Communications Industry Researchers (CIR) predicts that the optical metro/access market will grow from $1.2 billion in 2000 to $3.5 billion by 2004.

Optical networks are creeping closer and closer to end user customers, and with that comes a greater emphasis on customized services such as bandwidth on demand and other advanced services and applications across the optical layer. And in order to provide these types of services, optical networks need closer ties to communications software systems, including provisioning and billing.

Provisioning: The First Wave

A few years ago, a shift began in the optical market. Several factors led equipment manufacturers and optical service providers to reconsider how they viewed the high capacity and high speeds of fiber-based networks.

"There was an acknowledgement that racing to the next highest bandwidth level was not entirely what the whole market was about, especially in the metro environment," says Lawrence Gasman, president of CIR. "From the equipment providers' side, there was an acknowledgement that they needed to do something else to distinguish themselves in the marketplace; from the service provider side, there was the feeling that they've got all this bandwidth and now they needed to do something useful with it."

This shift in thinking led to an increased emphasis on rapidly provisioning high-bandwidth services, Gasman says. Companies at the forefront of that effort were Sycamore, ONI and Ciena, he says. "But now, it's almost impossible to find a hardware vendor who doesn't give you a fairly decent automated provisioning story."

As the hardware manufacturers matured, they moved past just providing a high-capacity box and instead started wanting to generate more revenues, says Randy Fuller, vice president of marketing at Emperative, which makes service provisioning software. "They started realizing that network infrastructure doesn't mean anything if you can't provision it and if you can't bill it."

Automated provisioning of optical services improved upon the slow process and potential errors of manual provisioning. However, after the hardware manufacturers developed automated provisioning software, "there was no consensus on how to do provisioning," says Pierre Lin, vice president of network architecture at Yipes Communications, a provider of metropolitan optical services. "Everyone has a proprietary way, even if it's automatic."

The so-called newer generation of equipment makers, which caters to the metropolitan optical service providers, started seeing that even if they had ways to automatically provision their network elements, most providers were using hardware from several different vendors.

"Optical vendors are turning to third-party OSS software companies because of heterogeneous networks," Lin says. "In retrospect, if you look at legacy optical transport solutions and look at SONET gear vendors, they all have very consistent provisioning. This is due to Bellcore [now Telcordia] and its efforts to find the common denominator to get everyone congregated on one OSS."
Lin adds that as the industry is moving to a different way of conducting telecom business, newer optical vendors face a big challenge. "These next-generation vendors are liberated from the shadow of Bellcore, but the downside is that nobody has been able to come to a consensus on the OSS side," he says. "There is a tremendous opportunity for third parties now, but the challenge for service providers like us is how to balance our choice of optical vendor versus third-party OSS solution providers.

"Hardware companies may have an element management system or software that deals with only their stuff, but it's very difficult for a hardware vendor to have software that supports more hardware than their own," Fuller says. "Lucent isn't going to let Nortel see their stuff, and vice versa." He adds that with so many new optical companies coming up and so much multivendor technology, third-party vendors are creating a single, neutral system for optical provisioning. Emperative has announced integration for its ProvEn Optical automated service provisioning product with optical equipment from Redback Networks and Ciena. Integration work with some Nortel equipment is forthcoming.

Provisioning for optical networks may be the first time the hardware vendors really considered the crucial software needed to support different services, but it certainly won't be the last.

Optical Vendors Look to Complex Billing

"It starts out with provisioning and fault management, and getting customers and circuits up, and then making sure that they stay up," Fuller says. "Now that people have the infrastructure in place and are trying to get a little bit more sophisticated, it's a natural thing to start differentiating on price-so usage-based billing and tiered services become more of a factor."

CIR's Gasman says that with provisioning, there's only so far to go. "Automating the provisioning process makes a lot of sense, but what's being pushed a little too far is the story of new revenue generation from it," he says. "The claim is that if I have a Web site I can order OC-3 this week but go with OC-48 three weeks later. There are potential applications for the future, but practically speaking it hasn't taken off in huge amounts, and the amount of revenue generation from that is relatively small."

Possibly due to this realization but also because of the need to remain competitive, optical equipment makers have started taking a very keen interest in other OSS components beyond provisioning. "It isn't that provisioning is going away; in fact, I'd say provisioning is the most important aspect of network management in optics right now," Gasman says. "But other things are becoming market-distinguishing features or things that service providers might need."

He points to performance management and fault management as key software issues. Another is billing.

Optical vendors are starting to take the blinders off and realize that their equipment is just one link in the service delivery chain.

One of the so-called next generation of optical providers is Riverstone Networks, which sells switch routers to the metro network service providers. The company not only talks to customers about the importance of usage data collection and billing but also incorporates related features into its hardware.

"Now, people can deliver more scalable bandwidth, and the more we get into bandwidth and service on demand, the infrastructure itself needs to have some insight into what's going on dynamically, or else the provider may not know what's happening in the network for days or weeks or months," says Steve Garrison, director of corporate marketing at Riverstone. "If a provider has to provision a new lambda for a customer on demand, they have to be able to account for the fact that the customer was provisioned and what the new bandwidth is. Delays to the back office means a bill could be wrong, or the service provider doesn't make as much off a service as they should."

To ensure that changes to a customer's bandwidth or other services are accurately collected and passed to northbound OSS, Riverstone has created a multitier system. The company says the hardware counters built into its routing ASICs can collect network usage statistics at wire speed.

Garrison adds that Riverstone's products support RMON 1 and 2, meaning they can collect a lot of information such as history, time of day, destination, and applications running at a particular time. Its routers can analyze data going through them on the fly and can read up to Layer 4 in packets, which includes the TCP port header.

Riverstone's view is that flow accounting or flow detail recording lack the management and verification capabilities to ensure the proper collection of data. "We're the only ones who use a connection-oriented protocol to send information from the box to either a mediation server or a billing server; everyone else uses UDP [user datagram protocol]," Garrison says.

UDP is commonly used in the transport of streaming content. One of its advantages in that context is that if a packet gets dropped during transport, it doesn't get replaced later, thereby causing phone conversations and video clips to include bits that are out of order. However, in the case of usage collection, dropped packets can be a problem. "We use TCP," Garrison says, "so you get more guarantees that the SLA was met, since TCP will resend dropped packets and reassemble the data record at the other end."

Riverstone has partnered with Xacct and Portal for mediation and billing (although service providers can use OSS software of their own choosing). "Getting content to the mediation device has been the challenge in overprovisioned or congested networks," Garrison says. Service providers with large networks can send data directly to Xacct's mediation platform so the network doesn't get slowed down. Garrison says that while Riverstone employs a UDP-based connection from its routers to the back-office servers, Cisco's NetFlow technology is used from mediation and billing servers out the other side.
While Riverstone uses a combination of hardware and partnerships to shore up its OSS story, other vendors are going about it a bit differently.

For example, Nortel Networks is looking within for integration between optical equipment and OSS. Through Nortel's lines of business, which include acquisitions such as that of service provisioning vendor Architel and CRM vendor Clarify, the company has been involved in a number of efforts including integration with CRM, provisioning, and billing/mediation.

"As part of the pathway to differentiate ourselves from all the rest of the equipment manufacturers in the marketplace, OSS and BSS have become more strategic; otherwise, you can't fulfill orders, you can't bill for it, and you can't have service assurance for it," says Chun-Ling Woon, vice president of marketing for eBusiness at Nortel.

In addition to work with Architel components, the company has also done preintegration with CRM from Clarify. Much of this work falls under the company's optical services management, which provides OSS functionality such as CRM, order management, performance management, fault management, and network activation for VPN, wireless and optical networks.

Nortel is also addressing mediation, billing and SLA management with its Service Accounting application. It provides unified billing mediation not only for Nortel's own optical equipment but for other products as well. "Today we collect performance measurements and operational metrics from our entire optical product line, and we feed that into our performance reporting packages," says Kevin Farrell, portfolio director for service accounting/unified data collection. "Today, that's pretty static, but it's going to become much more dynamic. As this happens, billing is going to be a key component of that."

Today, Nortel has interfaces to billing platforms from Geneva (recently acquired by Convergys) and Portal.

Optical Usage Data

Optical hardware vendors are approaching the integration with billing and mediation systems a bit differently, including exactly how to correlate usage data to billable records.

Optical routers and switches simply don't keep track of detailed information on the data passing through the network, according to Nortel's Farrell. This is the reason why passing that data from the hardware to upstream systems is so crucial. It could involve using probes to pull data from routers or going to devices such as gateways, authentication servers, log files, and agents to provide additional information that can be coordinated to create a billable event.

The output of all of this consolidation can be in a variety of formats. Yipes' Lin says IPDR as a common format is a good step, but he says the jury is still out on how to associate fields of the detail record with an SLA.

In the case of Riverstone, data record output can be in a variety of formats after information from the optical router and other sources is consolidated. "It doesn't have to look like a CDR or IPDR, as long as you have a relationship with a mediation or billing partner that's willing to work with you," Garrison says.

Nortel also deals with different data formats, which has been a big challenge. "With optical, we're pulling data off the optical network element managers," says Denis Bouffard, portfolio director for Optical Service Management. "Once we collect that data we convert it to a universal record, which we call a network accounting record; it could be converted to an IPDR."

The challenge, of course, with gleaning usage information from optical equipment is how fast information passes through these devices. That's been a concern for optical service providers. "A big challenge for us is how can we get an engine robust enough to collect enough information and keep it when you have a 1 gigabit per second connection-or as we'll offer later in the year, 10 gigabits per second," Lin says. "You need a statistic counter, which is a major challenge with high-speed networks. Optical equipment doesn't generally keep information, so you have to build a counter to track it. The higher the speed, the more important real time becomes." He adds that collecting information would not slow down the network; rather, the switch or router would come to a crawl.

That's also a hurdle for Riverstone, which Yipes has been working with. "The unique challenge to the optical network is that [data collection] has to be done in such a way that it doesn't impact the actual throughput or the intelligence of the box itself," Garrison says. "This is why everyone is trying to find a clever way to do this-or like we did, do everything in hardware, so we have this 'wirespeed' concept."

Lin says that for his company, part of the new breed of optical Gigabit Ethernet providers, the key is to select the right vendor from the beginning. (For more on metro optical providers and how they affect OSS, see "Optical Comes to the Metro,"). "We leveraged our business case to select vendors to build what we want in their switch," Lin says. "In the early days, some of us even helped with tools they need to embed in the switch."

Considering the success Yipes and others in this space have found, the optical providers and OSS vendors would do well to listen to what's needed in the real world.

Challenges Ahead

Optical technology isn't new, but bringing it closer and closer to the end user is a fairly recent development that has led to significant changes in the back-office infrastructure. By moving key optical features from the core to the edge, users have more control over how much bandwidth they receive and the types of services delivered over that connection. But we're only in the earliest stages of this evolution.

"We're between 5 and 10 percent of the way through the life cycle," says Emperative's Fuller. "The service providers are putting high-capacity switching in the metro, and doing access with it is fairly new-in the past couple of years. It takes a while for people to build out their networks and bring customers on, and we're following the natural course of where this network technology has allowed them to go."

Besides the greenfield optical companies, Tier 1 carriers are also looking at tighter integration between their optical networks and OSS. As the Tier 1s roll out new or upgraded segments of their network, they might bring in specific tools or customize their existing OSS to manage the new services.

So far, many of the major optical vendors such as Ciena, ONI Systems, Redback Networks and Sycamore Networks have made announcements about integration with OSS. They may be developing their own solutions or partnering with third-party software vendors. The important thing is that both the equipment vendors and the optical service providers are realizing the importance of having a strong story that encompasses billing, mediation and other OSS components.

"OSS used to be this sort of Cinderella area that you send your not-so-bright engineers to," CIR's Gasman says. "It wasn't very complicated, but that has all changed. The vendors have recognized that they are not necessarily the best people to do some of these things, and they've also recognized the multivendor aspect of it. There's a much bigger issue around OSS in the optics area."