ATIS Working Group Will Tackle IPTV

Under the working group, ATIS’ 11-member CIO Council (representing companies such as Bell South, AT&T and Verizon) will look at high-level IPTV architecture requirements as part of a three-pronged approach: one effort focuses on security of information and data, one on Sarbanes-Oxley’s impact on IT, and one on IPTV OSS/BSS.

The working group will try to establish requirements (by Q1 2007) to foster efficiency of OSS/BSS. The CIO Council will work to synchronize its members’ IT initiatives with the network-focused initiatives of ATIS as they develop the OSS/BSS framework.

“We want to encourage vendors to introduce OSS/BSS solutions that conform to a common reference model. Right now, OSS/BSS is developed in a proprietary manner company to company, but the CIOs have voiced interest in a high-level architecture,” says John Pautlitz, director of industry forums within ATIS.

Indeed, as carriers try to get into on-demand services and interactive advertising, numerous non-traditional functions and processes will need support. As they grapple to create feedback loops among themselves and content providers, a map of functions and processes could prove beneficial. For that reason, the IPTV initiative’s kick-off was a joint effort between the Telecom Management and Operations Committee (TMOC) and the Ordering and Billing Forum (OBF). The focus was on the OSS/BSS components and processes to be targeted by the IPTV working group.

“They wanted to start by identifying what IPTV functions are associated with which business processes, and then start to think about the interfaces across functions,” says Pautlitz.

So far, the CIO Council has identified sales, order tracking, provisioning, mediation, rating, billing, trouble management and problem management, service test management and service quality management as key areas for work under IPTV.

The next step will be to leverage the work already accomplished by ATIS and other standards bodies.

“For example, the architecture documents and work in the IIF [the IPTV Interoperability Forum] and the IPDR and settlements documents in TMOC will be leveraged,” says Pautlitz. “Already, they are being shared with the ITU-T and 3GPP, so we want to incorporate that work.” He says the ITU-T has done a lot to incorporate TMF’s eTOM documents, which focus on identifying business processes.

“This will start 100 miles wide and not too deep as we try to drill down into the processes. If we drill too far too soon, then it can get proprietary as each company proposes its ideas,” Pautlitz says.

Additionally, the CIO Council will evaluate other transactions inherent in a dynamic, interactive environment like IPTV, such as advice of charge (AoC) for downloadable content, prepay balance/credits check, and purchases through interactive advertising.

Other considerations for the IPTV architecture reference model will revolve around documenting the roles of IMS and SDP in the overall framework, as carriers try to quickly and easily expose data to third parties so they can create new service bundles to wring more value out of their networks. To build something as important as IMS, carriers need models and tools that help manage services and orchestrate the interrelationships among applications and network elements.

With IPTV, a slew of new data models, APIs, contracts and functional architecture elements will emerge. The working group has identified certain areas where these elements will be particularly important:

• Commercial advertising—advertisement injection, including billing and appropriate settlement by the operator or content provider

• Partner agreements and content settlement, which will require coordination with the initiative on content partner management for IPTV underway in the working group

• Content rating and parental control interfaces

• Subscriber authentication and authorization, and access to subscriber profiles across wireless and wireline networks

• Usage (active) mediation—collecting IPTV usage and correlating it with other events.

As service delivery becomes more complicated, the inter-domain relationships among IMS and non-IMS systems will require sophisticated orchestration. With its IPTV working group, ATIS hopes to establish a high-level framework into which the common and uncommon functions and processes can be mapped.