Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Order Fulfillment
Communications products/services could range from Voice services to IP and
Data services to Hosting and CPE services. Some of the examples of
communications products/services are:
After order entry, validation and submission, orders are decomposed and
sent for provisioning. Upon fulfilling the decomposed orders and appropriate
testing of the circuits, the orders are put into inventory. The following subsections explain the Order Fulfillment related functions and OSS/BSS
systems.
2.1.1 Order Management
Order Management systems are complex systems that allow customer or
customer service representatives to capture and process new orders, modify
existing orders, process customer moves and changes, price quotes and
orders, validate orders, etc., while supporting multiple channels such as
Web, Order template documents and partner applications as well as multiple
lines of businesses.
Order Management includes the following areas:
VoIP and the phone line, each of which would be sent to the
appropriate provisioning systems.
One of the major problems service providers often grapple with is that, as
new services are added to the offerings, led by different business units, the
lack of flexible order management platform results in product/service specific
OSS/BSS applications. These in turn result in higher time-to-market as well
as increased costs of maintaining many different applications and systems.
Product catalog based Order Management solutions attempt to solve these
problems by storing and processing qualification rules for services based on
customer profiles, ordering channels, service locations, product
interdependencies, availability, customer eligibility and other business
constraints.
2.1.2 Service Provisioning
Service Provisioning systems are systems used to setup products/services
for the customer after an order for the services has been created and
accepted by the CSP.
Service provisioning activities include specifying the pieces of equipment and
parts of the network to fulfill the service, configuring the customers routing
path, allocation of bandwidth in the transport network, setting up of wiring
Offering SLAs implies that the service provider has the ability to monitor, act
and report the level of service, in order to assure the quality of services
delivered to the customers. Service Assurance refers to all the activities
performed for such an assurance. The goal of Service Assurance is to
provide an optimal customer experience, that helps retain existing
customers, attract new customers and prevent penalties arising out of
violation of SLAs.
The following sub-sections introduce some of the common service Assurance
systems.
2.2.1 Fault and Trouble Management
Fault Management Systems are designed for detection, isolation and
correction of malfunctions in a communications network. They monitor and
process network alarms generated by network elements (routers, switches,
gateways, etc.). An alarm* is a persistent indication of a fault that is cleared
only when the triggering condition is resolved.
Examples of trouble or fault in a network are damage to an optical fiber line,
switch failure, etc. Such a problem in the network can result in a chain
reaction where many network elements in a certain path produce alarms*.
Fault Management Systems may be either a component within Network
Management Systems or as a standalone set of system and application
software.
The following figure illustrates how fault management works.
systems on the devices. EMSs can also feed equipment status data back to
network and trouble management systems. EMSs use protocols such as
Common Management Information protocol (CMIP) or Transaction Language
(TL) or Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to communicate with
activation and other systems.
Activation systems often comprise a library of adapters to various network
systems. They usually also support transaction control, i.e. the capability to
roll-back operations already performed, in case an error occurs.
It should be noted that Provisioning systems interact with the Inventory
systems, both to verify that the required network elements and other
facilities are available, and once the resources are provisioned - to reflect the
changed on-line configuration of the facilities. Therefore, provisioning
systems have close channels with inventory systems. As a result, some
vendors have combined workflow capabilities with inventory management
capabilities in their products.
other performance data such as counters or timers that the network and
system elements maintain as part of their normal operation. This is referred
to as passive measurement. Performance data is captured by polling MIB
using SNMP or using syslog, (I & II), FTP, EMS feeds, etc. Most passive
measurements report on a single network element.
For example, an Ethernet Switch may have a MIB which provides in and out
data volumes of each port, histograms of frame sizes, number and types of
erroneous frames, central processing unit (CPU) busy status. Associated
Remote Monitoring (RMON) MIB-type data can then list ten most active
users, etc. Performance Management tools can access the data by using
SNMP to poll the MIBs at predefined intervals.
Statistics on performance variables can also be captured via dedicated
network appliances known such as probes and sniffers that monitor or
probe customers local loop connections, packet performance, etc. This form
of performance testing is usually referred to as active testing.
Packet sniffers typically monitor signaling protocols such as SIP and RTP by
inspecting packets on the wire/fiber, using pings, DNS, FTP, HTTP fetches,
etc. Examples include WireShark and Geoprobes.
Probes such as Brix Networks BrixWorks Verifiers and Tektronix/Minacom IVR
tools typically emulate customer traffic in order to test or probe specific
paths to measure the quality of the services supported. Probes could be
either placed into the network or could be built into network elements such
as in the case of Ciscos IP Service Level Agreements tools.
Note that active measurement measures a service, such as application
response time, instead of the internal operation of a network element.
An example of active network performance test is injecting ping (short,
network layer echo packet) into the network aimed at a remote IP address.
Round-trip time is measured if the ping packet returns, and an error counter
is incremented if it doesnt.
Performance statistics captured by active or passive performance tests
are normalized and routed to relational databases and/or data-warehouses.
An alternative is to pass the performance data directly to Performance
Management tools. For example, Concord eHealth could collect performance
statistics from Netcool agents via SNMP polls at a pre-defined interval.
Performance statistics are initially analyzed to determine the normal
(baseline) levels. Appropriate thresholds are determined for each of the
interesting performance variable so that exceeding the thresholds indicates a
problem.
Performance Management tools then measure the performance variables
against SLAs defined as thresholds per application or service, on an on-going
basis. In case of exceptions they report them to alarm handlers. This form of
performance monitoring is reactive performance monitoring. Some tools also
support proactive monitoring by way of providing simulation tools that helps
network operators project how growth in network traffic will affect
performance metrics and plan to take proactive countermeasures such as
increase capacity.
Performance Management tools may also support real-time and historical
reporting. Some CSPs have taken performance statistics of the network
affecting customers circuits to their customer self-service portals.
2.2.3. Topology & Configuration Management
Older networks and systems were static and the network wiring was fixed in
place, and sometimes required long outages while changes to the network
and its configuration were being made. Any error or inconsistency in the
configuration files of different network devices caused problem, and
2.3 Billing
IDC [6] defines Billing as: the processing and compiling of charges and
enabling of revenue collection for network usage, feature transactions, and
Traditionally, for phone calls, Call Detail Records (CDR) have been used to
record the details of the circuit-switched phone call. CDR includes
information on start time of call, end time of call, duration of call, originating
and termination numbers. CDRs are stored until a billing cycle runs. For IP
Based Services, a new standard is gaining acceptance called Internet
Protocol Detail Record (IPDR). IPDR supports both voice and data.
Billing systems use mediation output to determine charges for the
customers. It is also used to feed other downstream applications such as
Fraud and Churn Management.
2.3.2 Rating
Rating systems calculate the charge for an individual call, IP usage event,
etc. using the CDRs/IPDRs. Rating systems apply charges based on preconfigured pricing rules, applicable discounts and rebates from promotions.
This rating process has grown increasingly complex in recent years. In older
times, it was solely a matter of taking the length of the call, assigning a
price based on the mileage band (calculated by cross-referencing the prefix
of the originating and terminating numbers in a table of values), and
assigning discounts based on the time of day (peak, evening, night), day of
the week, and holidays.
Modern rating systems can assign discounts based on calling circles, provide
flexible rating plans based on size of accounts and increase switching costs
[2]. These serve as strategic marketing tools but can be very complex to
administer and operate.
2.3.3 Billing Systems
Billing systems aggregate rated calls, IP/data usage events, etc. and
calculate customer invoices. In the United States, billing is usually performed
once a month.
Billing systems combine rated records with prior balance information,
payment records, recurring charges (such as line rentals), one-time fees
(such as installation and service charges), promotions and discounts
associated with the customer account, taxes and credits. Overnight billing
batch jobs are among the largest batch environment at a CSPs operating
environment. Each customer is assigned a specific billing cycle.
According to Insight [2], the holy grails of the billing industry are unified
billing and convergent billing. With unified billing, a customer gets a single
bill for all services provided (or billed) by the service provider, appropriately
rated, discounted, and taxed, and a single contact for inquiries and
negotiation.
2.3.4. Interconnection Billing
In the competitive world of communications, service providers often tie-up
with partners, in order to bundle their own products with their partners. This
helps the service providers to provide attractive bundles of products and
services. However, in order to successfully settle interconnect billing
settlements an effective Interconnection Billing is required.
Interconnection Billing products support inter-working of a service providers
billing systems with the corresponding systems of another service provider,
based on interconnect agreements and contracts.
2.3.5. Revenue Assurance
Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management systems verify billing, detect and
identify unauthorized usage of service provider network assets. Some of the
kinds of frauds are Usage and Subscription.
Usage Fraud means that a customer uses the telecommunications network
illegally. This is accomplished either by obtaining a service with no intent to
pay or by obtaining unauthorized access to the network (i.e. hacking or
cracking).
Fraud Management systems typically detect and prevent unauthorized
access to a communications network by analyzing traffic patterns on the
network. Some examples are provided in [8]:
3. Conclusion
3.1 Summary
OSS/BSS systems and applications automate many of the day to day
operations performed in a communications service providers operating
environment. They optimize the time taken to perform these operations and
make the business processes more efficient.
There are no all-encompassing OSS/BSS systems that can be installed,
integrated, tested and allow the service providers to easily modernize their
end-to-end operations functions.
Service providers, therefore, use all the different approaches: best-of-breed
in some areas, off-the-shelf in some, and home-grown custom applications
in the remaining areas, to modernize and optimize their operations.
More often than not, many of these OSS/BSS systems are integrated with
the others in a point-to-point fashion, as part of discrete projects and
programs, sponsored out of different business units. This leads to point-topoint integration of OSS/BSS systems unless the programs/projects are
planned with a strategic goal.