Intelligent Network OAM&P Capabilities and Evolutions for Network Elements

Abstract

The intelligent network (IN) gives telephone companies a timely way to create new services for their customers. For IN to succeed, the network operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) strategies for IN must be in place, evolvable, and workable. An operations platform with IN-specific OAM&P capabilities must be developed before new IN-based services are deployed. This operations platform must be flexible enough to provide the necessary OAM&P support for any IN services without additional development work from network element (NE) and operations system (OS) vendors. Once a new service is created, the IN network must be able to deliver and maintain the service by using the OAM&P capabilities available in the IN operations platform. This paper discusses the capabilities and evolutions of major network element's OAM&P for the United States IN in the areas of billing, service provisioning and verification, network engineering, network traffic management, and maintenance.