An intelligent-agent approach for managing congestion in W-CDMA networks

PhDResource Management is a crucial aspect in the next generation cellular networks since the use of W-CDMA technology gives an inherent flexibility in managing the system capacity. The concept of a “Service Level Agreement” (SLA) also plays a very important role as it is the means to guarantee the quality of service provided to the customers in response to the level of service to which they have subscribed. Hence there is a need to introduce effective SLA-based policies as part of the radio resource management. This work proposes the application of intelligent agents in SLA-based control in resource management, especially when congestion occurs. The work demonstrates the ability of intelligent agents in improving and maintaining the quality of service to meet the required SLA as the congestion occurs. A particularly novel aspect of this work is the use of learning (here Case Based Reasoning) to predict the control strategies to be imposed. As the system environment changes, the most suitable policy will be implemented. When congestion occurs, the system either proposes the solution by recalling from experience (if the event is similar to what has been previously solved) or recalculates the solution from its knowledge (if the event is new). With this approach, the system performance will be monitored at all times and a suitable policy can be immediately applied as the system environment changes, resulting in maintaining the system quality of service

ADAPTIVE MODELS FOR NEXT GENERATION WIDE AREA NETWORKS

A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) controller in a cloud service delivery architecture may encounter a number of challenges including, for example, timeouts, download or push failures, etc. To address challenges of these types techniques are presented herein that support a holistic solution. Aspects of the solution comprise, among other things, understanding a device’s ability to process configuration in a real-time network and staggering a configuration push based on, for example, a device’s ability to process and consume configurations. Aspects of the solution employ, for example, the use of bandwidth knowledge to force a centralized network management system control connection to come up on a specific wide area network (WAN) interface that has higher bandwidth availability, the collection of network characteristics to profile a device’s behavior for receiving different types of policies from a SD-WAN controller, the scheduling of SD-WAN customer premise equipment (CPE) devices for configuration delivery in an ordered fashion such that the devices that are chosen are the ones with the least WAN congestion, the profiling of device connectivity patterns to provide guaranteed service-level agreement (SLA) commitments for policy enforcement, the possible use of dummy templates for diagnostic purposes, etc

Community participation agreements: a model for welfare reform from community-based research

Summary In its June 2001 budget, the Federal Government announced a new framework for welfare reform, Australians Working Together. One component of the framework is the proposed development of Community Participation Agreements in remote Indigenous communities, to deal with welfare income payments, mutual obligation and related service delivery. This paper presents the results of community consideration and the author’s field research between March and August 2001 at Mutitjulu, Central Australia, regarding what such an Agreement might look like on the ground. Mutitjulu presents a microcosm of many of the issues currently affecting remote Indigenous communities. As Mutitjulu residents struggle daily to come to terms with substantial economic and social difficulties, they find their culturally-based forms of social and cultural capital are being undermined by external factors seemingly beyond their immediate control. These include: the continuing failure of governments to develop a comprehensive approach to planning and service delivery, reflected in a band-aid approach to addressing welfare dependence; the debilitating impacts of inter-generational dependence on welfare income; and the multiplicity of local corporate structures and institutions with ill-defined roles and poor accountability to the Mutitjulu community. The failure to adequately address welfare dependence and major community problems of substance abuse, family breakdown, domestic violence, and low levels of education is viewed by Anangu (local Aboriginal people) as directly contributing to a noticeable deterioration in the wellbeing of individuals, their families and the community at large. There is growing frustration over the failure, at all levels, to deal effectively with these matters. The Mutitjulu Community Council has formally decided to proceed with the development of a Community Participation and Partnership Agreement (the ‘Mutitjulu Agreement’), in partnership with government and other stakeholders, as one means to begin addressing these matters. The development of practical partnerships with key government departments and local agencies will be a critical factor in the overall success of the proposed Mutitjulu Agreement. It is for this reason that the name of the proposed Agreement has been expanded to include the strategy of ‘partnership’ and well as ‘participation’. The paper begins with an overview of the background to the community-based research, terms of reference and research methodology. The proposed Mutitjulu Agreement is then placed in its national policy context to identify the factors that have generated this particular initiative. The paper goes on to describe the community context for the Agreement, including the nature of the local welfare economy, and Anangu views about the impacts of the welfare system. Consideration is given to the nature of contemporary Anangu social and economic relations, and how the term ‘participation’ might be most relevantly defined for the purposes of a community agreement about participation

What is it that the application of modelling and simulation can contribute towards understanding and managing service quality data for internet service providers (ISP) in Australia?

This thesis assesses the appropriateness and effectiveness of discrete event simulation technique to understand and manage service elements in the ISP (Internet Service Provider) context. The baseline for this research involved the secondary data published by ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) and TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman) involving ISP numbers, Internet issues/complaints data. As many relatively new services are being offered, ISPs are finding it difficult to cope with varying customer expectations and their future technology expectancy. Access to infrastructure, avoiding anti—competitive behaviour from large players and service differentiation has become more important than ever for their survival. A number of challenges such as lack of provision of good quality service, lack of ability to cope with increasing (or varying) customer demands and expectations and lack of flexibility in providing services need to be overcome. The service environment in networking has focused heavily on the technical side and very little attention has been given to functional variables such as complaints handling, aligning technical and functional service quality processes and effective service recovery during service failures. Relying fully on the technical side obscures the nature of service. This research identified the fact that end users’ perspective of quality of services need to consider not only the inherent quality of the network, but also the service quality provided by the ISP. Users perceive poor service quality provided by their ISP if they do not get help desk support required from using the ISP services. This can turn a complaint about a problem in to a complaint about the company. The research question is answered by this thesis “What is it that the use of discrete event simulation technique can contribute to the understanding and managing service quality data for different ISP service operations?” The research methodology chosen was discrete event simulation methodology. The discrete event technique involves building up models based on the dynamic behavior of a network system as the time progresses. The appropriateness and effectiveness of this technique was tested by modelling technical service elements (modelling policy based networks using differentiated service schemes, alarm based network management system for effective service level agreement monitoring) and key functional elements that determine ISP non-technical service performance (ISP complaints handling, ISP call centre performance variables). The scenarios led to the development of an integrative simulation framework that addresses both user level service quality issues and network system oriented service quality issues. In the past user level service quality issues have been provided with negligible importance. The framework developed can help ISPs to model service attributes and use the results from such simulation studies to make competitive marketing decisions. The issues raised before and after simulation can be compared for effective service design. To achieve service excellence ISPs have to understand the interrelationship between various service quality dimensions such as tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy and how these dimensions affect customer perception of ISP service quality. In conclusion the research found that discrete event simulation can be used to understand and manage service quality data by internet service providers involving different ISP service operations

Towards goal-based autonomic networking

The ability to quickly deploy and efficiently manage services is critical to the telecommunications industry. Currently, services are designed and managed by different teams with expertise over a wide range of concerns, from high-level business to low level network aspects. Not only is this approach expensive in terms of time and resources, but it also has problems to scale up to new outsourcing and/or multi-vendor models, where subsystems and teams belong to different organizations. We endorse the idea, upheld among others in the autonomic computing community, that the network and system components involved in the provision of a service must be crafted to facilitate their management. Furthermore, they should help bridge the gap between network and business concerns. In this paper, we sketch an approach based on early work on the hierarchical organization of autonomic entities that possibly belong to different organizations. An autonomic entity governs over other autonomic entities by defining their goals. Thus, it is up to each autonomic entity to decide its line of actions in order to fulfill its goals, and the governing entity needs not know about the internals of its subordinates. We illustrate the approach with a simple but still rich example of a telecom service

Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA