Designing OSS to cope with greater transience

There are three broad models of networking in use today. The first is the adaptive model where devices exchange peer information to discover routes and destinations. This is how IP networks, including the Internet, work. The second is the static model where destinations and pathways (routes) are explicitly defined in a tabular way, and the final is the central model where destinations and routes are centrally controlled but dynamically set based on policies and conditions.”
Tom Nolle here.

OSS of decades past worked best with static networks. Services / circuits that were predominantly “nailed up” and (relatively) rarely changed after activation. This took the real-time aspect out of play and justified the significant manual effort required to establish a new service / circuit.

However, adaptive and centrally managed networks have come to dominate the landscape now. In fact, I’m currently working on an assignment where DWDM, a technology that was once largely static, is now being augmented to introduce an SDN controller and dynamic routing (at optical level no less!).

This paradigm shift changes the fundamentals of how OSS operate. Apart from the physical layer, network connectivity is now far more transient, so our tools must be able to cope with that. Not only that, but the changes are too frequent to justify the manual effort of the past.

To tie in with yesterday’s post, we are again faced with the option of abstract / generic modelling or specific modelling.

Put another way, we have to either come up with adaptive / algorithmic mechanisms to deal with that transience (the specific model), or need to mimic “nailed-up” concepts (the abstract model).

More on the implications of this tomorrow.

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