WiMax Operator's Manual

OSS Software Integration
CHAPTER 8 ■ NETWORK MANAGEMENT AND OSS 183
As indicated earlier, the best-of-breed approach prevailing in the service provider community
in respect to OSS has led to major software integration problems—problems for which, unfortunately,
no easy solution is in sight. Industry groups such as the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have
devoted tremendous efforts toward standardizing hardware and have achieved commendable
results, but such standardization deals only with the lowest layers of the network. It is certainly
an important first step toward providing an integrated, ready-to-deploy infrastructure for the
broadband wireless network operator, but it provides no real basis for managing the business
aspects of the network.
The relative immaturity OSS software sui generis, and especially the difficulty in integrating
various software modules, could plausibly be the most difficult problem facing the wireless
broadband operator today. And it is a problem for which only partial out-of-the-box solutions
are available. But difficult as such integration problems are, network operators must address
them. They simply have no choice.
That being the case, the following sections cover the options.
Protocols for Software Integration
In existence today are protocols and standards providing for the exchange of information
among network elements and associated software control systems (that is, network element
management software modules and network management software modules). Two such
protocols are used more than any others: Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Both are generally concerned
with supporting machine-to-machine communication among network elements, but their
approach is quite different, and CORBA represents a far more sophisticated and far-reaching
technology.
SNMP originated in the enterprise world and is designed to collect management information
from devices on the network. It presupposes a centralized network management software
system. SNMP uses a request-and-response process to obtain information from the participating
devices and consumes little bandwidth in transmitting such information, which makes it
robust. It will provide such information to the centralized control console as network topology,
traffic patterns, and diagnostics, and it is capable of disconnecting nodes as well as permitting
centralized management of said nodes. What it is not designed to do is directly control devices
in the network or to support automatic flow-through processes where one event triggers
another. An example of the latter is flow-through provisioning when a subscriber orders new
services, and subsequently the billing, provisioning, network management, network discovery,
and network element modules all automatically respond in a sequenced fashion.
SNMP is a well-proven protocol, and nothing is wrong with it, but its intended use is in
internal local area networks (LANs) where issues such as billing and SLAs are irrelevant. It is
simply not designed to support commercial service offerings. The majority of wireless broadband
products made today support SNMP, and that is as it should be, but such support should
not be considered a complete solution to the operator’s software OSS integration problems.
CORBA, the other major protocol for achieving network integration, reflects a revolution
in software development that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, namely, the rise of
object-oriented programming. That revolution was entirely successful, and today its effects