Provisioning in complex networks
Ganesan Radhakrishnan · Bell Labs Technical Journal · 2007
IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) solutions emphasize services including all-Internet Protocol (IP) voice, data, video, multimedia, and other user-centric services. IMS applications allow network convergence among wireline, wireless, and packet networks and interaction of services in disparate, multivendor, multitechnology networks. This increased level of sophistication leads to increased operational complexity and underscores the need for a unified provisioning system to minimize the overhead of managing network data. This paper outlines a scalable, distributed, provisioning framework for disparate data networks. It examines the current approaches to provisioning and their shortcomings in dealing with disparate data. At a fundamental level, it views provisioning as two distinct problems of data management and process modeling. It depicts a unifying framework, by separating data management from the application that provisions the data, leading to data-model independence. It shows that unified provisioning requires the support of many distinct technologies including federated data management, software component framework, distributed computing framework, and formalisms for describing behavior. © 2007 Alcatel-Lucent.