Provisioning in Complex Networks

IMS solutions emphasize services including all-IP voice, data, video, multimedia and other user-centric services. IMS applications enable network convergence between wireline, wireless and packet networks and enable interaction of services in disparate, multi-vendor, multi-technology networks. The increased level of sophistication leads to increased operational complexity and underscores the need for a unified provisioning system to minimize the overhead of managing network data. This paper outlines a scalable, distributed, provisioning framework for disparate data networks. It examines the current approaches to provisioning and their shortcomings in dealing with disparate data. At a fundamental level, it views provisioning as two distinct problems of data management and process modeling. It depicts a unifying framework, by separating data management from the application that provisions the data, leading to data-model independence. It shows that unified provisioning requires the support of many distinct technologies including federated data management; software component framework; distributed computing framework and formalisms for describing behavior.