Migrating the OSS/BSS
The jury is still out when it comes to OSS/BSS systems for the IMS. Much is yet to be
done to provide a complete end-to-end solution for the various functions within the
back office and support systems. Provisioning of the various entities, managing the
facilities through inventory systems, and service order provisioning where new services
are activated for subscribers are some of the functions required to support any
telephone network.
There are some solutions available on the market today, supporting SIP and
DIAMETER protocols and providing various functions such as monitoring and provisioning.
Many more are being developed.
Moving from Legacy to Convergence 37
The charging systems used to support billing are evolving, as are the standards
themselves. The 3GPP is continuing development of the charging standards to be used
in IMS. Charging must be changed, because the IMS supports all forms of media in
addition to voice. Charging systems today are built for voice services, or for event-type
charging (such as messaging delivery), but do not integrate very well. The 3GPP has
addressed this through a completely new architecture to support the charging for multimedia
services throughout the network.
Performance management systems are continuing to evolve as well, but most have
not yet been developed to capture end-to-end network transactions.
Pages:
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106