Jung Tjong

Provisioning Voice Over Packet Networks: A Metadata Driven, Service Object Based Approach

Voice over Packet (VoP) technology has made significant inroads into service providers’ infrastructure, leading to the convergence of voice and data networks. As voice functionality gets distributed across the network, VoP management systems need to address the challenges of coordinated provisioning across multiple devices. To be able to cope with the many flavors of VoP networks that exist and the multitude of different network elements that they consist of, it becomes a necessity for the provisioning system to be custom programmed. This paper presents a metadata driven approach, based on a concept of Service Objects, that allows a provisioning application to easily handle variations in network architecture, equipment types, and equipment versions. We describe our implementation experiences with a VoP management system that leverages our approach and its flexibility, utilizing XML definitions and Enterprise Java Beans as implementation technologies.

Challenges and Experiences in Transitioning Management Instrumentation from Command-Oriented to Model-Driven

The popularity of model-driven development has grown significantly in recent years pushing its rapid adoption in the management instrumentation space. While standards and tooling have been created for virgin management instrumentation applications, little has been done to address the challenges of transitioning existing applications into the model-driven arena. With management interfaces constructed with divergent stovepipe implementations to meet their differing requirements and data characteristics, moving the entire system to a model-driven environment is an expensive and impractical proposition. Discussed are the design challenges and implementation experiences encountered during the successful transition of a legacy management instrumentation system to a model-driven system, including major design choices and the rationale behind them.