Meet People Directory - Financial

Developing management solutions for location-based services in the

6/6/2004

Developing management solutions for location-based services in the
FOKUS UMTS 3Gb Test and Development Environment.
No Management without Measurement
Berlin, FOKUS is participating in the EU-funded IST project
AlbatrOSS (Architecture for Location Based Application of Third
Generation Operation Support Systems) which is specifying an innovative
3rd generation operations support system (OSS) architecture applicable to
an open 3G mobile telecommunications environment. FOKUS has been
developing a 3G Service Usage subtrial which has been able to exploit the
availability of the FOKUS UMTS 3Gb Test and Development Environment
to perform R&D on the management of 3G services.
The 3G Service Usage subtrial comprises a Portal Framework developed by
FOKUS that provides OSS support to service providers, a location-based
mobile dating service from Lucent Technologies in the Netherlands, and
the FOKUS UMTS 3Gb Test and Development Environment. The aim of
the subtrial has been to evaluate the OSS functionality provided by the
Portal Framework components in QoS Measurement and Service Roaming
scenarios. One of the highlights of the work is the measurement of UMTS
network performance parameters that can be used by a Monitoring
Analysis Component to determine the QoS of the services running over
the network. A prototype Monitoring Analysis Component has been built
and the first results measuring end-to-end QoS are available. These
measurements will be used by SLA management and billing components
that are being developed in the second phase of the project. Other Portal
Framework components supporting specific mobility aspects of 3G
services, such as roaming and user profile management, have also been
successfully tested with the mobile dating service provided by Lucent
Technologies.
Monitoring network performance and analysing it to ascertain the
end-to-end service quality in a UMTS environment is challenging.
However, it is certainly an essential task because 3G services will face a
stiff competitive market and the quality perceived by customers will make
a difference when choosing services and service providers. The research
work at FOKUS is aiming to develop meaningful measures of end-to-end
Berlin
March 2003
QoS of 3G services and a practicable regime to manage these services.
The measures provide information not only on the UMTS bearer service
but also on the QoS of an entire 3G-service product. The research work is
based on the work of 3GPP and the TeleManagement Forum, which are
two of the leading industry consortia in the telecom industry. Therefore it
addresses some of the key requirements being put forward by a large
number of telecom operators and service providers. Other standards used
for the development of the Portal Framework include PAM and W3C with
its Resource Description Framework and Composite Capability/Preference
Profiles. The implementation is based on SUN's J2EE to create a scalable
and adaptable system.
The AlbatrOSS project is an IST project (IST-2001-34780) that started in
March 2002 and runs for 2 years. Open issues that AlbatrOSS is addressing
include OSS support for location-based services, roaming and mobility
management, profile management and dynamic service personalisation,
new billing models, and QoS in a 3G environment. The partners comprise
the coordinator Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland) together with
ATOS Origin Integration (France), Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany), Lake
Communications (Ireland), Lucent Technologies (Netherlands), Telefonica
I+D (Spain), T-Systems Nova (Germany), and UH Communications
(Denmark).
FOKUS researches and develops advanced technologies for the information
society, inspired by a Vision of a user-oriented, PC and communication
environment available at any time. The vision takes full account of
the versatility and individuality of users and their personal attitudes and
capabilities, and it also covers place and time factors governing information
selection and the range of options open to the user for access to the
communication environment. Driven by this Vision, FOKUS has developed
a “seamless” communication infrastructure which can carry global
location-neutral services in a range of different quality levels.