سیستم مدیریت کاربر (UMS) اپراتور بر پایه استاندارد TMF615

ABSTRACT Operator User Management System Based on the TMF615 Standard

Network environments of service providers are managed by different operational support system (OSS) solutions, and by their original UMS. Communications problems between the central user management system (UMS-C) and the local UMS (UMS-L) system must be solved in order to provide service provider network management.

Nowadays, service providers use OSSs offered by different producers in their network environments. Each OSS uses a different communication technology, such as CORBA and XML (as shown in Fig. 4), and this can cause major difficulties for the Telecom operators to deal with integration problems and complex systems. Moreover, each OSS supports a different set of operations. Mapping these operations according to the requirements of the operator is a challenging issue. This is because operators use non-standardized solutions for their network management.

Figure 1 illustrates the OSS problem for Telecom operators. As shown in the diagram, the OSS identity management system is the main activation point for the provision and control of the main operations. However, there is no auto-provision and therefore, all the operation requests to the OSSs are made manually. For instance, an operator with the business role of fault manager must deal with thousands of different personal accounts on thousands of different systems. The total time required for the creation of these local accounts, the testing of all these accounts by the operator, and the correction of all errors is very high. Therefore, the management of such local accounts is a big problem for any administration team, in terms of time and complexity. For this reason, a standardized, central specification and auditing mechanism are immediately needed, for the management of OSS network elements in a more secure, consistent, and efficient way. To meet these requirements, one initial group of service providers (Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Telefonica), OSS producers (Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens-Network) and identity management system producers (IBM and Wipro) leagued together to solve the difficulties posed by management systems. These difficulties are caused by using different UMS. This group raised their demands at the Telemanagement World (TMW) meeting. In the same meeting, collaboration was arranged with the TMForum [1] and they determined to solve problems. The first version of the TMF615 operator user management standard was issued at the Telemanagement World (TMW) meeting in 2008.

The purpose of reforming the TMF615 standard was to combine the existing and new OSSs of service providers and their applications with less effort. Service providers do not have to be interested in new and modified interfaces or their unique applications. Therefore, this also covers updated or covered versions of OSS applications. In this way, an operator can connect all the systems consecutively and use the accounts in the manner of the traditional user and audit management.

Multiple proprietary management systems, which are supplied by OSSs vendors, are used by the multi-vendor networks in a typical Service Provider environment. To obtain secure and consistent networks, both uniform and central provisioning operators are needed, which in turn necessitate specific authorizations for service providers. The TMF615 system provides those access rights and authorizations between the service provider and the operator. The TMF615 operator user management system is designed for the following:

• Reducing the complexity caused by the use of different protocols
• Providing security
• Increasing the number of people who understand the whole system.

Another design approach of the TMF615 is security. As shown in Fig. 2[1], security in the TMF615 is classified into three classes, including system security, network security and user security. However, we only consider the user security class while constructing our system, because we focus on user management systems and these systems require user security. User security includes the following security issues:

• Authentication of the system [1]
• User authorization [1]
• Operations audit [1]

In this paper, a common communications’ platform, based on the TMF615 standard, is designed and developed, in order to work together with different network components for Telecom operators. Generally, this paper proposes an approach that includes an interface able to solve the communication problems caused by a service provider’s network environment using different products from different producers.

The approach presented thereby contributes scientific and commercial applications by producing new solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first paper focusing on detailed performance evaluations of OSSs using the TMF615 standard. Hence, it is expected that this study will provide a better understanding of OSSs and the potential advantages of the TMF615 standard and provoke interest among the research community to further explore this promising research area.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the key literature on the TMF615 and OSSs; Sect. 3 presents an overview of the OSSs and their evaluations; Sect. 4 describes the TMF615 protocol, and the opportunities and challenges of supporting TMF615 and its general architecture; Sect. 5 specifies the proposed system architecture for describing systems’ components; Sects. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 describe the implementation of the proposed system, respectively. Sections 11 and 12 then provide an evaluation of the proposed system via a system performance evaluation, and test the efficiency of the system through further experimental evaluations. Finally, the paper is concluded and future works are described in Sect. 13.