Sounding Board: Too Much Information?

Mediation Systems Tackle Barrage of IP Network Usage Data

The slow development of operational support systems virtually has negated a decade of frenzied innovation and stymied growth in the transmission of voice, video, messaging, conferencing and other converged applications over packet data networks, many innovators say.

The new transmission technologies, designed to enable such services as Internet-based telephony, web-based conferencing and multimedia content distribution, are quite mature and working fine, they say. What is lacking? Complex, behind-the-scenes systems for service creation, activation, performance assurance, usage measurement, customer care, billing and other OSS technologies.

The hard financial times that befell some high-profile, national DSL service providers in 2000 can be blamed, partially, on their use of OSS able to support only flat-rate, Internet access. The service providers simply lacked the ability to generate sufficient revenue for their ambitious infrastructure construction plans.

However, at the dawn of 2002, there are signs the OSS laggard may be catching up to next-generation network complexities.

Back-office systems contracts, signed last fall, among IP-based service providers suggest mediation systems are catching up with the explosion of network devices or elements and usage data and rating parameters that can be used to make services truly pay for themselves.

To reach that goal, such parameters promise to go beyond time and distance of a call to rate services based on bytes of data transferred, amount of bandwidth consumed and even the value of content -- based on customers' willingness to pay more for this than for that. Still, mediation systems face a daunting task in mastering highly distributed usage information collection points in the IP realm.

For the past century, collecting information about a phone call's length and distance was sufficient for telephony billing purposes.

A centralized telephone switch collects relatively simple data about a call, then a mediation system aggregates that data, matches them with a service, its price-per-unit, and finally generates a call data record (CDR) in a standard format with the specific customer's name on it.

With the advent of IP, ATM, frame relay, and other wireline and wireless packet networks, that job will never be so simple again.

"For years and years, mediation was pretty straightforward software written in-house by the service provider," says Bob Hales, vice president, North American marketing, for Dublin-based Openet Telecom. A mediation provider for AT&T Wireless, Openet released a new version of its Fusion software in November that integrates new and legacy billing systems with event-based transaction pricing and management from legacy network infrastructures, IP networks and multiple generations of mobile networks.

"With the deregulation of telecom and the proliferation of services and equipment and software vendors, the service providers needed to get out of the mediation businesses," Hales says. "In IP, the amount of data goes up two orders of magnitude, where there might be 200 pieces of information to record a single service session, and where there are many opportunities for lost data. Being able to handle both the circuit world and IP has become a big advantage for us."

Even for service providers delivering only IP services and no legacy circuit-switched services, the new mediation systems must leap frog "traditional flat rate, monthly billing," he adds. "For VoIP to pay for itself, payment has to reflect resources used, the quantity of data being handled and even content type, since banking record transmission ought to be valued higher than simple e-mail."

And there's the rub: Resources used. Old, monolithic telephony switches constitute about all of those resources in the circuit world. But IP infrastructure can involve scores and even hundreds of device types used to get data from one point to another, from web and application servers gateways, switches and routers to wireless base stations, integrated access devices, modem banks, firewalls and directory servers.

"We're vendor agnostic, and we have lots of different and brand new equipment types and gateways, so we knew we faced collection of data from a lot of devices to send downstream, not only to billing but to network monitoring and other systems," says Lee Cascio, vice president of network engineering for VoIP carrier ITXC Corp., which late last year implemented the Inter-mediatE IP mediation platform from Intec Telecom Systems.

While ITXC's own in-house SQL 7.0-based database system managed well, "in terms of scale, we concluded that the job would be more intensive," Cascio says. "We needed a system with known scale and the ability to handle high volume. Because we have so many collection points, we needed a system with the integrity to assure complete and accurate measures. That would have been very difficult to build in-house."

Intec product management vice president Rick Woods says that ITXC's infrastructure includes a range of VoIP gatekeeper and gateway devices and a complex combination of transactions among many devices per session.

For example, Inter-mediatE includes a "duplication checking software module" to ensure a VoIP call that travels through multiple gateways on the way to an ultimate destination gateway is not duplicate recorded as multiple calls by those multiple gateways. The system uses "fuzzy matching" algorithms to synchronize the separate internal server clocks of gateways and other devices to determine call termination, while traditional telephony switches run off a unified network clock.

If VoIP isn't tough enough, multi-service IP networks and transmission of services across a mix of wireline, mobile, Internet and circuit-switched networks grows even more complex in terms of highly distributed devices, probes, software agents and other collection points.

Watching thousands of such points requires a variety of sniffing methods, including simple network management protocol (SNMP) messaging, remote monitoring (RMON) polling, file transfer protocol (FTP) and Cisco Systems Inc.'s NetFlow messaging, not to mention systems peculiar to mobile and geo-positioning networks.

Whereas collection in circuit networks took place in centralized switches, "IP billing info gets more interesting closer to the edge," Woods says.

Consequently, to reach the goal of collecting the right data from so many highly distributed points across multiple networks, mediation players including Intec, Openet, ACE*COMM Corp., Narus Inc. and XACCT Technologies Inc. have devoted much innovation to developing adapters to their systems that can be implemented rapidly in any old or new device. Bragging rights hover around how many thousands of network devices each vendor has adapted.

Also, Intec, Openet Telecom and other vendors are now hawking plain-English scripting languages that enable service providers themselves to do that job. "In addition to its record of working at scale with carriers like BellSouth, Intec offered rapid adapter creation," says ITXC's Cascio. "We now see Intec as a partner, and at each juncture we can ask them to develop the platform or use the scripting training to do the development ourselves."

Flexible Foundation

Innovation in services shows no signs of making such service management platforms any simpler.

"Each type of IP service has its own nuance," says Intec Telecom's Woods. Consequently, the mediation vendors formed the Internet Protocol Data Records (IPDR) consortium about a year ago. IPDR's mission is to define the next-generation network equivalent of the telephony CDR, and "to define the services in demand and to examine their characteristics and define the minimum data fields needed" in an IPDR, on a service-specific basis.

When it comes to something like location-based mobile services, which incorporate transmission resources and user directory lookups, location information queries and transactions and other processes, "the number of events that can happen and be recorded gets larger and more complex, and there you're also talking about real-time collection plus correlation of all that event information," Woods says.

For VoIP, with many calls typically terminating to standard phones, "transactions and data must be correlated between IP links and public switched telephone network links," says Openet's Hales. "At the same time, a VoIP session might include concurrent file transfer or other transmissions, and all this has to be understood, correlated and billed accordingly as an integrated service."

Such is the aim of a deal reached in October between ACE*COMM and end-to-end Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) service solutions provider Ubiquity Software Corp. They will optimize ACE*COMM's Convergent Mediation software for Ubiquity's Helmsman Application Services Broker and Network Server platforms, targeted to service providers building packet-based network infrastructures. The companies said the deal will help packet network service providers more easily create and deploy convergent communications services from the network core to end-user desktops, without disruption to existing OSS systems.

Already providing multi-service mediation to carriers including Level 3 Communications Inc., ACE*COMM is "generating IPDRs for streaming video, WAP, VoIP and other new services," says chief marketing officer Martin Demers. To help service providers use Ubiquity's SIP service creation and management environment, "we can collect SIP information and merge it with information from other sources in the network."

In a SIP-based VoIP service, a SIP proxy server may provide information on when a session invitation was accepted, but not on when an actual conversation started. "Our system might find that information from a softswitch," Demers says. "That's the kind of correlation we're providing to clients now."

Applied to a service like a SIP-based streaming video movie service, SIP signaling itself might collect data on the start and stop time of the movie, "but not usage info, such as the length of the movie, bytes transmitted, or whether the content is a new, premium title or old, $1.50 content, which you'd need to gather from a network element like a server."

Still, with rapid device adaptation, user-friendly scripting tools, and common outlines for the shape that call records can take, the mediation vendors appear to have laid down a solid foundation for matching new services with real resources used -- a critical benchmark in bringing OSS up to speed with the ability to deliver new applications.

"In circuit networks, there was some minimal need for correlation. But in data, the job is much more grandiose, involving thousands of events that are generated by network elements, and so requiring a lot of aggregation, correlation and filtering," says Demers. "The more access you have to information from the most sources, the more innovative and flexible the service provider can be."

The explosion in billable events also must extend beyond mediation to the rating engines that apply price-per-unit equations to create bills. Convergys Corp. predicts the introduction of next-generation services will increase the volume of billable events approximately tenfold. The processing load will be further increased by the requirement to rate many of these new services in real time, for example, where m-commerce transactions are involved. To prepare for this deluge, Convergys introduced in December its Geneva Distributed Revenue Processing (DRP) product, which allows many instances of Geneva's active rating engine to be distributed efficiently on a cluster of rating servers.

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