An architecture for provisioning IP services in an operations support system

Abstract

The paper discusses an architecture for a provisioning system that meets the challenges currently facing service providers in a service and subscriber-based OSS (operations support system) environment. The architecture makes a clear separation between a provisioning core, which is a general framework for provisioning services, and service definitions that model the provisioning view of a service. The architecture is distributed, scalable and extensible and is especially suited for scenarios where a large number of services is expected to be offered, deployed, and managed. The service definitions can be used by the other OSS components to correlate information to provide complete device-to-service-to-subscriber diagnostics for faults, performance degradations, and accounting. It is argued that this approach leads to natural, efficient and effective management solutions.