New generation network and services management for converged networks

Abstract

The Internet has changed the manner of thinking and building networks for both service providers and telephony operators. On one hand, service providers need to improve their networks in order to meet current and future customer requirements. Indeed, their applications are increasingly demanding for sophisticated and guaranteed networks services such as mobility, security, quality of services ... On the other hand, telephony operators, mobile and fixed, migrates their networks from traditionally circuit switched to packet switched and especially Internet protocol. This migration which aims to support classical and advanced voice and video services is done through the introduction of IP in their core networks and by swing to voice protocols (SIP, H.323...). To rally the above requirements, convergence between mobile and fixed networks around Internet protocol is strongly needed. New generation networks (NGN) aims to fulfil all the requirements of this convergence, and is subject to lot of works, one by academic and industrial communities, and especially at the TISPAN, ITU-T, 3GPP and TISPAN. Ensuring all the services promised by the NGN, and offering service providers and phone operators means for efficient and cost effective service deployment can be carried out only if new network management architectures are designed and deployed. A lot of efforts are currently done within several standardisation bodies in the network and service management field (TISPAN, 3GPP, TMF, ITU, ..). In order to give the reader a clear understanding of all this efforts, and before describing them, we will first locate them according to their work targets. The 1st NGN Management Architecture Standards has been produced by ETSI TISPAN WG8 (TS 188 001) in September 2005, and it has been recognized that the WG8 is now the world leader in NGN Management. As consequence, TS 188 001 is now referenced in TMF and ITU documents, and a lot of efforts are currently done between TISPAN, 3 GPP, TMF and ITU in order to harmonize the world management efforts.