Managing density of requirements during intelligent optical network product development
Vikas S. Shah · 2005
Telecommunications service providers have embraced Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) as the most cost-effective technology for increasing the capacity of optical fiber networks. Intelligent Optical Network (ION) now promises intelligent transport services that allow clients such as routers and switches to interconnect using optical interfaces. Efforts to standardize intelligent control plane have reached various stages in several bodies such as IETF, ITU-T and OIF to provide a scalable, interoperable, and distributed control plane that is applicable to multiple network technologies. It is increasingly difficult for carriers to meet customer’s requirements and still ensure their own profitability due to multiple incompatible network layer interfaces and functional overlap between the layers. As bandwidth requirements increase by orders of magnitude, the most pressing issue is “how to manage and control large optical networks?” Passive and active components of ION are continuing to evolve. The current trend in the software industry is to position significant effort for reducing the high cost of product development through focusing on system requirements engineering such as generating correct dependencies from a formal requirements specification or creating set of test cases for ION service could provide dramatic cost savings. Our approach is to modify and enhance capabilities of available open source web-enabled distributed requirements specification tool (DRES 0.8) to automate and analyze density of requirements. Primary enrichment is requirements traceability feature aiming at defining relationships between ION service requirements and artifacts produced during the product development life-cycle. Methods for maintaining accurate requirements are thrust of this paper.