Understanding the Need for Connectivity Services Director for Managing Services

An important aspect of any network management system is to monitor, control, and plan network infrastructure. With networks constantly increasing in size, heterogeneity, and complexity, effective management and planning of networks become more important.

The following network management capabilities are essential for effective management of services on devices:

• Network management systems must be able to manage hybrid networks that offer both legacy TDM and next-generation IP-based services.. Simplification of essential tools required to set up, configure, provision, and operate devices and the services that run on them are key to keeping operational costs down and achieving efficiency.

• A network management system must offer simple and efficient tools to detect service faults and performance so that service levels are assured. Such a system includes tools to correlate faults with the alarms and traps generated on devices, and provide a real-time view of the complete operational status of a network.

• Any new network management system needs to provide seamless support for legacy functions while enabling new features to support packet-based networks. This may require the use of standards-based open interfaces to enable such OAM systems to query, configure, provision, and manage the new devices and services being deployed.

• An ideal network management system should present a unified device management interface for all devices from the access network to the core network. In the context of mobile backhaul, a unified network device management interface is essential to efficiently deploy a large number of devices such as cell site gateways.

  Assuming that these devices are hosted in remote locations, after the device is deployed, it is essential to ensure that the device management interfaces (DMIs) provide the right level of automation to reduce the time required to set up and configure each device without requiring additional manual intervention at the site.

• Network Management systems must be standards compliant and provide open interfaces for interoperability with existing systems in an operator’s network. Standards-based northbound interfaces that use REST APIs are becoming the norm for such interoperability. Mobile backhaul networks typically contain tens of thousands of cell sites connected to aggregation devices and further, into the core network.

• Network management systems must be able to scale and offer efficient, user-friendly mechanisms to provision services in bulk. For example, reduction in the number of steps required to provision a pseudowire from end to end greatly improves the efficiency of a network provisioner, while also reducing the number of provisioning errors.