OSS/BSS has played and continues to play a vital role for service providers in ensuring that services are appropriately delivered and billed. Their role takes on increasing importance as operators struggle to meet the mounting customer requirements presented by the dawning of the converged network.
The converged network can be viewed as the future of communications — a network in which multiple technologies, protocols, applications and services come together into a common, high-speed IP transport cloud. While there are many benefits to this convergence, it also presents problems for service providers, OSS/BSS, the network monitoring tools that provide data to these systems and the data access methods that underlie the entire process.
Resource Oversubscription
The first problem that must be addressed deals with resource oversubscription in the network monitoring tools that provide data to OSS/BSS systems. More specifically, as speeds increase at the core of the converged network, processing resources on existing network monitoring tools are being overrun by data. Because most tools are designed to monitor a specific application, service, or suite of services, each tool needs access to only a small fraction of the data in a high-speed line. The process of isolating the service of interest can quickly exhaust a monitoring tool’s resources. If this issue is not addressed, service providers will need to either upgrade monitoring tools continuously, leaving tools with less processing power to become obsolete, or be forced to leave large areas of the network unmonitored.
The second issue exposed by the converged network deals with the multitude of network technologies, protocols and services that must be accessed and monitored from the core. As we transition to an all-IP world, services may be transported over a mixture of Ethernet, POS, ATM, or legacy T-Carrier/PDH networks, all of which need to be monitored to ensure that support systems are provided with a comprehensive view of the network. This gets further complicated when we consider that these protocols can also be tunneled through an IP network. Service providers are then faced with the choice of purchasing expensive interfaces on existing tools or, worse yet, purchasing entirely new tools to handle the interface conversions to IP.
Although the hurdles presented by the converged network touch every player in a communications network, they start with data access management, not with OSS/BSS or network monitoring tools. The remainder of this article will review the pros and cons of SPAN ports, passive TAPs, aggregation/regeneration TAPs, second-generation aggregation TAPs and monitoring access optimizers, and will draw a conclusion on which data access method is best positioned for dealing with the present and future of converged networks.