E2eUberIM: end-to-end service management framework for anything-as-a-service

Abstract

Telecommunication network operators (TNOs) are seeing an exponential growth in mobile and fixed traffic, and on a growing scale need to manage (in some cases even manually) operational data silos. These silos necessitate a high degree of expensive operation that limits the ability to rapidly compose new innovative services, leads to high and exponentially growing integration expenses, and impairs the user experience for deployed services. All this is reducing long-term TNO profits. To meet this challenge, solutions employing network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) have been proposed. However, different vendors of these solutions continue to deploy proprietary interfaces that are not interoperable with the new technology systems nor with legacy systems, thus further increasing the number of operational silos. To leverage existing efforts to provide new, high-quality services, we propose an innovative end-to-end service management framework called e2eUberIM. This framework contains a scalable, flexible, and volatile information model (UberIM) and a real-time, organic communication and storage process (e2eUber). It leverages the proprietary interfaces of different vendors, enabling the resulting enhanced operations system environment to automatically and in real-time optimize operational overhead while maximizing the user experience, and quickly field new innovative, composed any-services (XaaS). We document the e2eUberIM requirements and its design choices, as well as provide a set of implications for its successful implementation in operational, live TNO networks.