Software components-based management of cellular transmission networks

The first computer based operations support systems (OSS) appeared on the market a few decades ago; during this period there has been an unprecedented change in both the hardware and the software technologies associated with computer systems and their applications. Only in the last twenty years have we seen significant effort devoted to the development of standards and technology that can be applied to the design of large-scale modular OSS systems needed to manage digital communication networks. The continuing advances in the underlying technology have, in one sense, stimulated the proliferation of specifications and standards. Web and Internet technologies have strongly promoted the development of distributed open systems and the move to a new application architecture based on Web services has pushed this even further. Linux has gained a solid position as an economical and technologically robust business-computing environment and Java has offered a true hardware independent programming paradigm with flexibility that matches today\´s evolving business requirements. This paper discusses the complexity of real life OSS and why it has led to a heavy "systems integration tax" and what can be done to increase the overall efficiency by using a software components-based development approach. A practical case study demonstrates the benefits of using productized software components in the area of cellular transmission network management. Our key findings prove by numeric facts how the implementation time and required effort can be reduced