Feasibility Study for End-to-End Integrated Intelligent Managed Services

  • Status
    Ongoing
  • Status date
    2014-01-15
Objectives
The e2E-I2MSTM is a promising concept to act as an enabler for scenarios where end to end services are being delivered across next generation networks, particularly hybrid terrestrial-cellular -space solutions, where service quality and the end-user experience are key. The project aims to make such solutions accessible to small service providers as well as reducing cost for the well established large service providers, delivering high quality service management as the norm of innovative service offerings on the market.
The e2E-I2MSTM approach to achieve this presents a number of technical and commercial challenges. To address these challenges, it is of prime importance to validate the e2E-I2MSTM key innovations and ensure viability of the proposed development plan, the commercial benefits to Service Providers/Service Users and its project sales revenue.
The feasibility project objectives are to develop the core concepts of e2E-I2MSTM into a manageable technical specification from which future phases can be developed. The specification will be aligned with industrial requirements from the major Satcom markets, focusing on addressing specific risks. Production of a software demonstrator will illustrate the key concepts for a novel scenario where a communications service is provided over a Cubesat platform.
Challenges

Technical and commercial challenges include:

  • Developing an open integration architecture which can handle different levels of interface complexity (e.g. an SLA with Service Partner, a Network Management System with Network Partner).
  • Performing effective management at the service layer, addressing core features of how to represent the necessary management information and how to access it effectively.
  • Understanding requirement priorities for commercial service providers and service users to achieve effective end to end management of services/applications in hybrid network deployments.
Benefits

 Future products whether sold into the commercial or defence sector or both, are increasingly “service-centred” and attempt to better exploit underlying common transport networks and bearers.  This has resulted in service providers placing increasing attention on delivering new end to end services to their customers, along with efficient content provisioning models, information dissemination, application stores, billing approaches (both pre and post-paid) and value-added subscription based services to deliver these services. The prime intention is to differentiate and ultimately promote unique selling points (USP) for their services over other Service Providers.  

The ability to effectively and efficiently manage these end to end service-based products to a high quality will be a key differentiator to Service Users in many domains and particularly as service offerings are increasingly relying on cross-domain interoperability (e.g. environmental, security, energy, transport, etc.).  

The results of this project will feed into development of technology and solutions to support effective service delivery in current and near-future scenarios.

Features
Under the Feasibility Study, the work will develop further specification design details and software starting from e2E’s high-level concept for its e2E-I2MSTM. The concept includes support for:
  • Fault Management.
  •  Performance Management
  •  Configuration Management.
  • Inventory Management.
  • Specific Planning functions.
Service management requirements relate to viewing the service operation from the end-user perspective to cover:
  • Service Management.
  • Service Provisioning
The objective of this study is to validate the proposition by showing how the e2E-I2MSTM will work for a real managed service scenario which is suitably representative of the hybrid space-terrestrial problem-space.  This will include development of a demonstrator with a subset of the core functionality.

The solution meets the challenges of integration and distribution of function-rich software components by developing a central, near-real time service management model presented through Management Information eXchange middleware. 

 Click for larger image

Plan

The project kicked off in August 2013.  Development of the technical specification is followed by an Interim Review in November. Demonstrator development follows and the project reports in 1st quarter 2014.

Current status

The project has recently kicked off and is progressing towards the interim Review.