Applying Service Engineering Principles to TMN Systems

Recent work in distributed and telecommunication systems has become increasingly oriented towards applications in a global open market in telecommunications services, as the effects of liberalisation take hold. The areas of network and service management will be essential to competitiveness in this market, however the technologies and system development techniques widely used today (i.e. SNMP and CMIP) were conceived to address the needs of large corporate data networks and monolithic public telecommunication networks. How these technologies and techniques can be applied to management in an open market environment is not currently well defined. This paper describes some of the work of the RACE II PROJECT PREPARE in its application of ITU-T TMN recommendations to management solutions in an open services environment. In particular it describes the engineering approach taken to developing TMN systems in an attempt to tailor them to such an environment

Multi-service management in a multi-provider environment

As the spread of digital networks makes access to data communications globally available, the interest of communication service providers is switching away from the provision of these bearer networks and towards the provision of the value added services that will operate over them. At the same time the liberalisation of telecommunication markets is precipitating a dramatic change in the profile of communication service providers. In this complex telecommunications markets the open management, not only of the networks, but of the services themselves will become increasingly important. The large number and diversity of roles of the market players makes the management of inter-organisational relationships fundamentally important to the management of services. The ITU's series of recommendations on the telecommunication management network (TMN) provides a basis for inter-domain management, however, this and other standards have so far concentrated on the management of individual network components and of networks operated by single organisations. This paper provides an initial example of how the management of multiple services in a complex multi-player market can be modelled using TMN techniques for implementation on existing management platforms. The paper begins by briefly outlining current work in this field before describing aspects of this multi-player multi-service management problem and how they can be modelled and implemented in a real system

Experiences in Integrated Multi-Domain Service Management

Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of telecommunications services and management systems over multiple organisational domains. This paper presents some of the results of practical development work in this area, detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services. This work covers the integration of multimedia services, broadband networks, service management and network management, though the detailed examples given focus specifically on the integration of services and service management

Intelligent Integrated Management for Telecommunication Networks

As the size of communication networks keeps on growing, faster connections, cooperating technologies and the divergence of equipment and data communications, the management of the resulting networks gets additional important and time-critical. More advanced tools are needed to support this activity. In this article we describe the design and implementation of a management platform using Artificial Intelligent reasoning technique. For this goal we make use of an expert system. This study focuses on an intelligent framework and a language for formalizing knowledge management descriptions and combining them with existing OSI management model. We propose a new paradigm where the intelligent network management is integrated into the conceptual repository of management information called Managed Information Base (MIB). This paper outlines the development of an expert system prototype based in our propose GDMO+ standard and describes the most important facets, advantages and drawbacks that were found after prototyping our proposal

Experiences in Multi-domain Management Service Development

The developers of management systems and the management services that operate over them will be faced with increasing complexity as services are developed for the open service market. This paper presents experiences in the development of management services that span several administrative domains and which are therefore representative of the complexities of the open service market. The work described involved the development of TMN based management systems that provided management services in support of multimedia teleservices operating over broadband networks

Power Systems Monitoring and Control using Telecom Network Management Standards

Historically, different solutions have been developed for power systems control and telecommunications network management environments. The former was characterized by proprietary solutions, while the latter has been involved for years in a strong standardization process guided by criteria of openness. Today, power systems control standardization is in progress, but it is at an early stage compared to the telecommunications management area, especially in terms of information modeling. Today, control equipment tends to exhibit more computational power, and communication lines have increased their performance. These trends hint at some conceptual convergence between power systems and telecommunications networks from a management perspective. This convergence leads us to suggest the application of well-established telecommunications management standards for power systems control. This paper shows that this is a real medium-to-long term possibility

On content-based recommendation and user privacy in social-tagging systems

Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity, in which users engage collectively has been named social tagging, and it is one of the most popular in which users engage online, and although it has opened new possibilities for application interoperability on the semantic web, it is also posing new privacy threats. It, in fact, consists of describing online or offline resources by using free-text labels (i.e. tags), therefore exposing the user profile and activity to privacy attacks. Users, as a result, may wish to adopt a privacy-enhancing strategy in order not to reveal their interests completely. Tag forgery is a privacy enhancing technology consisting of generating tags for categories or resources that do not reflect the user's actual preferences. By modifying their profile, tag forgery may have a negative impact on the quality of the recommendation system, thus protecting user privacy to a certain extent but at the expenses of utility loss. The impact of tag forgery on content-based recommendation is, therefore, investigated in a real-world application scenario where different forgery strategies are evaluated, and the consequent loss in utility is measured and compared.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Service Management: From definition to information modeling

In this paper, we split the service management layer, as defined in the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN), into two sublayers, namely the service application management sublayer and the service network management sublayer. The former deals with managing the mapping of the non functional requirements into functional constraints over the telecommunication service of interest, while the second reveals the management details related to meeting the functional requirements over that service. At each sublayer, we propose an information model and emphasize the correspondence with the other sublayer

Integrated Expert Management Knowledge on OSI Network Management Objects

The management of modern telecommunications networks must satisfy ever-increasing operational demands. We propose a study for the improvement of intelligent administration techniques in telecommunications networks. This task is achieved by integrating knowledge base of expert system within the management information used to manage a network. For this purpose, an extension of OSI management framework specifications language has been added and investigated. For this goal, we shall use the language Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects (GDMO) and a new property named RULE which gathers important aspects of the facts and the knowledge base of the embedded expert system. Networks can be managed easily by using this proposed integration

Diffusion of mobile phones in Portugal: unexpected success?

This paper begins with a somewhat paradoxical situation: Portugal is one of the less innovative countries within the European Union by most innovation indicators but, simultaneously, it is a leading country in the diffusion of mobile phones. The remarkable evolution of the mobile telecommunications sector over the last 15 years turns the issue a little more intriguing. This paper addresses the diffusion of mobile phones in Portugal and focuses particularly on the take-off stage, which signalled a sudden change in the pattern of diffusion. The introduction of an innovation – prepaid cards – explains most of the change in the diffusion curve occurred around 1996 and the subsequent increase in the penetration rate. Prior known research has not considered pre-paid cards an important determinant of mobile phone diffusion, but pre-paid services had an enormous impact on the rate of adoption of mobile phones in many countries and it is the major take-off determinant of mobile phone diffusion in Portugal. The time lag between the launching of this innovation in Portugal and its adoption by other EU countries explains why Portugal not just caught up with the EU average mobile phone penetration rate around 1996, but moved ahead of it from then on