Software architectures and network management: A parallel evolution

Abstract

We are witnessing a progressive overlapping of many, once separated, pieces of the telecommunication world: transmission and switching boundaries are getting blurred, the concept of service cannot be easily partitioned into delivering and managing, the provisioning is entangled with operation, maintenance-operation and network architectures are intertwined. This convergence will continue in the future, network nodes will take care of switching calls and transmission flows, management will be distributed in the network, services will dynamically be provided onto a variety of networks, service control/operation/creation will be more and more integrated properties of the service itself. The unifying force behind this has a name: software. Software has perculated in the telecom world from the sixties reaching every cranny but it has been dealt with as a separate topic, not in the main stream of the telecommunication technologies. In these very last years there is a growing perception of the deep relations between software and network evolution (including the service and management aspects). The authors we address what this relation is, how they have to think about network evolution and software evolution together, and the steps toward this partnership. They focus on the relationship involving the network management, both because they feel it is going to be the first one to apply these ties and because it is the one the operating companies control most. >