Standards Watch : OSS Through Java Initiative Continues to Mature

The OSS through Java Initiative has continued to develop APIs intended to accelerate the development of OSS/BSS solutions to facilitate interoperable applications. The initiative’s most recent APIs are standardized under the Java Community Process (JCP) program, which consists of a specification, a reference implementation and a technology compatibility kit for each application area—all of which include source code and reference implementations.

In addition to the JCP, the OSS through Java Initiative leverages the work of other standards bodies, including the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Object Management Group (OMG), Workflow Management Coalition, International Telecommunications Union (ITU), IPDR.org and TeleManagement Forum (TMF).

The intention is to help carriers and service providers expedite the deployment of end-to-end services on next-generation wireless networks. When the applications are developed, the mission is to have plug-and-play capabilities.

As of last year, the first phase of API development focused on three areas: trouble ticket, 3G wireless service activation and quality of service (QoS)—projects led by Ericsson, NEC, Nokia, Nortel Networks, Sun and Telcordia.

By spring of this year, those three APIs were finalized, as was OSS Common—an OSS design pattern in which commonalities among the OSS-J APIs are defined and published.

Work on an additional set of APIs for IP billing and inventory are underway.

Inventory

The inventory API will enable access to product service and resource data. “Inventory is the key component enabling other OSS components to navigate the data they have in common,” says Michel Pedneault, senior product architect at MetaSolv Software.

It will handle the interrelationships among layers of inventory, such as products realized by underlying services, which are supported by resources in networks, and the relationships among all components. The API will also recognize cross-component relationships in other systems. “For example, inventory can be recognized by other components, say, in a fault management system that watches elements on the network,” Pedneault says.

“From our customers’ point of view, it will enable them to quickly integrate an inventory system with other OSS components assembled around it when developing next-generation wireless services, where OSSs need to evolve to account for new services. Because the pace of these IP and mobile services is that much faster, having open, interoperable APIs will be of great help to our customers,” he says.

IP Billing

The IP billing API is being designed to provide a common transport protocol and mechanism for communication between billing systems and systems that provide billable information. It will enable systems to query schedules or select data in a common way, so that mechanisms from different billing vendors can use the same protocols used by mediation companies.

“It will collect billing information from various systems, including mediation, network management systems or network elements themselves,” says Ken Dilbeck, director of software development at NEC. “The API schedules, queries and provides mechanisms for transport of usage records.” He clarifies that the specification does not define what a usage record will look like: “That is for the IPDR and OBF to figure out; we provide the mechanism to transport the information in any format.”

“We view this as an advantage,” he says. “We want the ability to communicate, to have our mediation systems communicate with myriads of billing systems. We’ve heard one company say they expect to cut 1.5 man years out in terms of getting source code, test suites and documentation ready for new applications because of the OSS-J IP billing API.”

The key, of course, is adoption. From the beginning of March to mid-June, developers made more than 10,000 downloads of the first APIs.

In May, IP VALUE of Frankfurt, Germany, released the first commercial application built to initiative specifications. Called premioss-sp, the application is part of the company’s premioss product suite, which enables service providers to automate the service provisioning process when launching IP services. While IP VALUE has not yet released the names of its pilot customers, the product suite targets carriers, xSPs and IP network operators.