A Survey of Requirement Engineering Interactions in Telecommunication Systems

Abstract

Summary form only given. Telecommunication systems are large, distributed, complex, heterogeneous and evolving systems that involve software and hardware components. These traits present a challenge from Requirement Engineering perspective. Telecommunication systems can be abstracted to having infrastructure layer that delivers services and consumer layer where end user devices use these services. As processing power of the telecommunication consumer devices gain more power and demand more bandwidth, it becomes more pervasive, gain importance and the end users will have greater dependencies on it. Telecommunication infrastructure technologies are also evolving on fast pace to deliver to customer needs and level of service expected. A fierce competition exists between new entrants and more established companies to deliver the telecommunication system with the features and constraints at competitive pricing and aggressive scheduling by using new technologies. Within the above facets, there are many stakeholders with conflicting and complex requirements. In many cases, the situation of conflicting requirements is complicated further by the interaction with existing systems. That can create large, complex, and conflicting requirements. This needs more than ad hoc approach to achieve consensus within the constraints of the systems. Requirement Engineering (RE) is the field that addresses these issues and provides paradigms, methodologies, and tools to resolve these issues. All these factors highlight the need for requirement engineering to assist new and evolving telecommunication systems to deliver the desired requirements with shortest period of time, lowest budget and cause the least amount of disruption for current users. There are multiple aspects of requirement engineering in telecommunications like paradigms, methodologies, tools, inter-dependencies and interactions. Since Requirement Engineering is a general field, this paper will focus on telecommunication industry current use and interaction with the Requirement Engineering field. This paper surveys the current landscape of telecommunication industry interaction with Requirement Engineering. The aspects of change, complexity, internal and external components present a challenge in requirement engineering to capture and present early stable requirements within known, unknown limitations and accommodation for future needs. Multiple approaches, frameworks, tools and solutions on Requirement Engineering in the telecommunication industry are explored in this paper. The following is an overview of the main topics covered in this paper: (1) Goal Oriented Requirement Engineering. (2) Service Oriented Architecture Requirement Engineering. (3) Context Aware Requirement Engineering. (4) Requirement Interaction Management. (5) Requirement Incremental Change Management. (6) 3rd Party Software and Off the Shelf Components Requirements Management. (7) Security Requirement Engineering. (8) Survey of Requirement Engineering tools in Telecommunications. (9) Currently used Requirement Engineering Standards. (10) Vision for Requirement Engineering Standardization.