Position Statement A Telco's Perspective on Future Research Direction of Network and Service Management Jae-Hyoung Yoo Assistant Vice President, Network Technology Lab., KT, Korea (styoo@kt.co.kr) Recently, the operational environment of telcos has become more complex and heterogeneous with the continuous introduction of new technologies. Also, due to fierce competitions, telcos need to provide more advanced services and higher quality of services at lower prices to customers. To meet the needs of customers and save operational expenses, telcos are seeking more advanced network management technologies and methodologies. In this statement, we are not proposing any new specific solutions but rather introduce the field operation requirements that should be considered in future research direction of network and service management. There are two important aspects that are often ignored or neglected in developing network management systems (NMSs). The first aspect is the requirement for new network management functions from the view point of network operators. The second aspect is the requirement for customer-oriented management functions. Below, we elaborate the required network operator oriented and customer oriented management functions from the KT's perspective. 1 Network Operator Oriented Management Functions Network operators are requesting several important functions that are required to simplify and speed up their operations. The network operator oriented management functions are 1) integrated management, 2) automation of workflows, and 3) automation of diagnosis functions. 1.1 Integrated Management In KT, a network operator is responsible for managing many different types of network elements, such as IP routers, transmission equipments, ATM switches, electric power systems, etc. Over the past 20 years, many NMSs and EMSs have been developed, but because the management systems are designed to manage specific domains, operators have to handle many different GUIs. Most manager GUIs have their own menu trees and specifically designed windows. Thus, it is very difficult to monitor the whole network status by accessing many different GUIs. The operators are asking for an integrated NMS which can monitor heterogeneous network elements in an integrated view. 1.2 Automation of Workflows Many OSSs/NMSs have been developed and applied, but only about 15% of the work in network operator centers (NOCs) is automated and the rest is still done manually. The major manual job is diagnosis of root cause, preparing daily logs and statistical reports, etc. Especially, it takes a long time to retrieve various data from many OSSs and NMSs to make a report. Thus, we believe the NMS should evolve to be the core of workflows in NOCs. 1.3 Automation of Diagnosis Functions When an alarm is reported from a network device, an operator tries to find the root cause of it through the use of many CLI commands. Since most of the NMSs were designed to monitor and control alarm and traffic flow in company-wide scale, NMSs do not have the functions to support detailed diagnosis functions. Perhaps because it is defined that control is automatic and management involves human. However, there is much need to automate diagnosis functions, which is somewhat between control and management plane. 2 Customer Oriented Management Functions Today's customers are demanding more information and analysis capability than ever before. The two important customer oriented management functions are 1) analysis of service interaction and 2) analysis of services affected by network and server faults. 2.1 Analysis of Service Interaction In the near future, traffic should be managed from a customer experience perspective. Problems can occur with interacting services within media streams that have nothing to do with the transport or access network. So, service providers are introducing deep packet inspection technology to look into media streams to monitor service behavior and diagnose very specific problems a customer might experience. Let's suppose a customer is connected to the Internet with a 10 Mbps leased line. When N people are using VoIP phones and M people are using IP-TV, and the performance of both services is degraded. Q1: Who is responsible for the degradation of service quality? A1: The service provider who sold VoIP and IP-TV services. Q2: Among the N VoIP and M IP-TV channels, which one is degraded and how is the quality is degraded? A2: We don't know yet. Q3: If some packets are dropped by priority control, how can the service provider explain the quality degradation to customers? A3: It's a good question! These questions are important but frequent questions from customers. Future NMSs should be able to provide answers to them. 2.2 Analysis of Services Affected by Network and Server Faults In the near future, NMS should evolve to provide end-to-end visibility from the service servers to customer terminals. The fault management function should provide more detailed and useful information. That is, the alarm severity has to be defined in proportion to the level of affected services. The list of affected customer and service information should be provided to the network operator, and if a fault occurs in a service server, the number of affected customers and degradation level of service quality should also be provided. One can think of techniques such as service-oriented architecture (SoA), policy-based network management (PBNM), packet capture and flow analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI) might be the solution to satisfy these requirements. These have been studied for many years and reasonable solutions have been developed. However, problems still exist and operators and customers asking for solutions!