StandardPM D3001 Final Report

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Initiative for

Increased Standardisation of

Performance Management in

Satellite Communications(StandardPM)

Final Report

ESTEC Contract Number: 4000102527/11/NL/CLP

ESA Technical Officer(s): Roberto Donadio, ESTEC, Noordwijk

Authors:

Lars Moltsen, Dan Andersen, Carsten Hellegaard

2operate ApS,

Aalborg, Denmark

Date: 12 August 2011

Document ref. no. D3001

The copyright in this document is vested in 2operate ApS. This document may only be reproduced in whole or in

part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, either with the prior permission of 2operate ApS or in accordance with the terms of

ESTEC Contract no. 4000102527/11/NL/CLP

EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

CONTRACT REPORT

The work described in this report was done under ESA contract. Responsibility for the

contents resides in the author or organisation that prepared it.




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Executive Summery

In this study, the first objective is to clarify the need for standardisation in satellite

communications of network management interfaces, in particular network

performance management. The second objective is to investigate the use of standards

in other telecommunications areas for possible reuse within satcom.

The study has been executed during the early summer of 2011 through interviews

with four key stakeholder organisations from the satcom industry, namely Inmarsat,

Avanti, STM, and ND Satcom. Furthermore, the use of standards in other telecom

domains was investigated through meetings and session participation at the TM

Forum Management World conference in May 2011 in Dublin. Finally, a number of existing standards were analysed and compared.

The study identified a clear need for development and implementation of standards in

satcom performance management for the following reasons:

1. Standards will enable operators of multiple networks of different technology

(e.g. satellite-based and GSM/WCDMA) to streamline operations by using the

same network management components in all networks.

2. Standards will open the satcom network management solution market, thereby

increasing competition and innovation.

3. Standards will reduce integration costs.

The study also identified a key reason why standardisation may not happen: Vendors

of network equipment will need to invest in standards implementation, whereas the

standards will mainly benefit operators, network management solution vendors, and

system integrators. So, there is a need for motivating equipment vendors. At least

nothing will happen without clear requirements put forward by the "end user" (the

operator).

From the analysis of existing standards, the study proposes MTOSI and CIM (from

telecom and IT communities, respectively) to achieve standardisation of satcom

performance management interfaces.







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Table of Contents

1. Introduction................................................................................................................4

Background................................................................................................................42. Analysis......................................................................................................................6

Defining the Problem.................................................................................................6

Interviews with Stakeholders.....................................................................................6

Summary of Interviews.............................................................................................8

Investigation of Existing Standards...........................................................................8

Inputs from Management World 2011....................................................................10

DVB-RCS2 Higher Layers......................................................................................12

Ongoing ARTES-1 Work........................................................................................12

3. Recommendations....................................................................................................13

Demand for Standardisation of Satcom Network Management Components.........13

MTOSI and CIM.....................................................................................................134. Commercial Evaluation............................................................................................14

5. Conclusions..............................................................................................................15







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1 Introduction

This project was started based on an observation by 2operate that there was a barrier

to sell its network troubleshooting solution (see "Background" below) to satcomoperators because of the integration overhead. A large part of the total cost of the

solution would be integration with legacy performance data interfaces, and in many

cases this would make the solution too expensive.

This observation was presented to ESA, and it was agreed that there was a need to

talk to stakeholders to determine if this was a general problem. The scope of the

current project was defined to also include an investigation of existing standards in

other telecommunications domains to identify if anything could be reused.

Initially, the benefits of a higher level of standardisation were expected to be:

1. Lower cost of network management system deployment in general.

2. Enable deployment of "commercial of-the-shelf" network management

components from a wider range of vendors - a more "open" market.

3. Align with standards and processes in other telecommunications domains -

thus enabling the NOC to operate several networks with the same tools.

The project was organised as a series of interviews with stakeholders and an

investigation of standards used in fixed and mobile telecommunications. The output

of the analysis phase was documented in an internal Analysis Report, and main

conclusions and recommendations are presented in this document.

Background 2operate is a new provider of advanced technology for automated network

troubleshooting. Its main product is the 2solve Troubleshooting Suite.

This tool can be configured to troubleshoot any type of network element (within

telecommunications or similar domains) where a solid set of performance indicators is

available to determine the state of the network element.

2solve Troubleshooting Suite supports the process below, which is also illustrated in

Figure 1:

1. Search network elements with degraded performance ("Fault Detection").

2. Immediately get a most likely root cause ("Diagnosis Creation") for eachidentified network element. The automation of diagnostics is what

differentiates 2operate from other network management solution vendors.

This functionality is based on modern reasoning technology which was

originally developed for automation in medical diagnostics.

3. Dispatch and track repair actions ("Solution Deployment").

4. Analyse network elements are a fix has been done ("Validation").







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Figure 1: The network troubleshooting process supported by 2solve.

The 2solve Troubleshooting Suite exploits so-called Bayesian networks to compute

diagnoses automatically for each presented network element based on a range of

available performance indicators. An example of how the end user can exploit

automated diagnostics in 2solve is shown in Figure 2. In the monitoring window, a list

of "worst" GSM cells from a live network according to number of dropped calls (TCH

Drops) is presented. Although only the scanned performance indicator is shown,

2solve has analysed approximately 200 pieces of data per cell, and the computed

"Most Likely Fault" is shown with a probability score at the right.

Figure 2: Example of automated diagnostics (right column) in 2solve.

More information about 2operate can be found at its web page: www.2operate.com.







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2 Analysis

The analysis conducted in the StandardPM project consisted of two main activities:

1. Interviews with stakeholders in the satcom business (operators, equipment

vendors, system integrators).

2. Investigation of the use of standardisation in mobile network operations.

These activities should provide data to evaluate the current situation in the satcom

domain as well as to make certain recommendations on how to improve the situation.

Defining the Problem

In order to provide as useful output of the project as possible, the problem was further

clarified into the following statement:

• It looks like there is a lack of centralisation and standardisation in the satcom

domain which causes high costs for system integration as well as lack of useof "commercial of-the shelf" (COTS) components in network

operations/management.

In order to solve the problem as much as possible within the scope of this project, it

was decided to aim to answer the following questions:

1. Is there a demand for bringing down costs of satcom network management

solutions?

2. Will "commercial of-the-shelf" (COTS) solutions be able to bring down costs

of satcom network management solutions?

3. What is the level of standardization in satcom network management?

4. Will increased standardization better enable off-the-shelf network

management solutions?

These questions were developed further into specific questions for satcom stakeholder

interviews, and they were used as guidelines for investigation of the use of standards

in mobile network operations.

Interviews with Stakeholders

Stakeholder interviews were conducted as 1-2 hour session (depending on

availability, interest, and willingness of key personnel) at stakeholder premisses(except in one case where this was not possible due to time constraints). The agenda

consisted of:

1. Introduction to the StandardPM project and 2operate (2operate as a good

example of a COTS solution which could be enabled by better

standardisation).

2. Interview, where the questions presented in Table 1 were answered (slightly

modified for each type of stakeholder - operator, system integrator, equipment

vendor).







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Table 1: Interview Questions

Headline Specific Questions

1. General: a) What are the components of your network management

solution?

b) Do you feel that your network management solution issufficient, or are you considering extensions (in which areas)?

2. Cost: a) Is cost an issue when deciding to extend your network

management solution?

b) What is the typical split of cost between system/software

price and integration?

3. Solution: a) How much do you develop/maintain your network

management solution yourself, and how much do you buy it

"off-the-shelf"?

b) What is the strategic rationale behind this?

4. Reducing Costs: a) How do you think costs could be reduced for network

management solutions?

b) Could integration costs be reduced (how)?

c) Would standard/open interfaces contribute to reduced

integration costs?

Interviews with the stakeholder organisations listed in Table 2 took place as part of

the analysis phase.

Table 2: Interviewed Stakeholder Organisations

Date Organisation

4th May, 2011 Inmarsat plc

99 City Road

London EC1Y 1AX

UK

4th May, 2011 Avanti Communications Group plc

74 Rivington Street

London EC2A 3AY

UK 19th May, 2011 STM Norway AS

Vollsveien 21

N-1366 Lysaker

Norway

17th June, 2011

(phone conference)

ND SatCom GmbH

Graf-von-Soden-Strasse

88090 Immenstaad

Germany







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Summary of Interviews

Due to the confidential nature of the interviews, it is not possible to provide all details

of the interviews in this report. Therefore, the following are general conclusions

extracted from the conducted interviews as well as - in a few cases - information from

stakeholders who did not want to participate in an interview.

It became clear that there is a strong demand for "harmonization" of performance data

in satcom networks (centralised data, open interfaces, standards) among some

stakeholders.

Operators, system integrators, and network management software providers

(2operate) are the most interested in improving the situation. Operators generally want

an open market for network management solutions, but they do not want to pay for

integration, and this becomes an issue for the system integrator.

Larger organisations and equipment vendors are generally not as eager, but they also

see that the problem is there, and would like the situation to be better. However, it isclear that these types of organisations will need to invest without a clear short-term

gain.

A general finding during interviews was that there is a need for standards to support

network operations centres (NOCs) operating multiple networks with different

technology (e.g. satcom and mobile in combination). This is illustrated in Figure 3.

Investigation of Existing Standards

This section focuses on existing standards from other telecom domains, in particular

from mobile network operations (2G, 3G, 4G) and IT operations.

There are many aspects of standardization in network management/operations, but the

focus in this project is on enabling integration of network equipment and network




Figure 3: Standardisation would enable operations of different types of networks

(Network A is satcom and Network B is something else) with the same set of tools.

CPEs

NOC

Hubperf.data

perf.data

Network A

Network B




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management systems. Therefore we are mainly looking for standards with an interface

towards equipment (network topology and performance).

In Table 3, we present the identified list of relevant standards which could potentially

be utilized in satcom topology/performance monitoring.

Table 3: Identified Relevant Standards

Standard Description

ITIL ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) dates back to the late

1980s as an initiative by UK government (Central Computer and

Telecommunications Agency) to standardize IT management practices. It has

been accepted as a de-facto standard in the industry and has been continuously

updated by Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in UK as well as

adopted.

ITIL mainly covers IT processes, and can be compared to the telecom-oriented

eTOM framework (TM Forum) and TOGAF (The Open Group).

Official home page: http://www.itil-officialsite.com/

CIM CIM (Common Information Model) is a standard providing a common

definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and

services. CIM is an initiative under DMTF (Distributed Management Task

Force). It has its root in IT management and it mainly has support from

enterprises such as IBM, HP, and Microsoft (board membership and key

people).

Official home page: http://www.dmtf.org/standards/cim

Frameworx MTOSI MTOSI (Multi-Technology Operations System Interfaces) is a standard

governed by TM Forum. It belongs to the "Integration Framework" which is

the core of "Frameworx", TM Forum's set of standards for business processes,

information, applications, and integration (see Figure 4).

MTOSI is an XML-based Operations System (OS)-to-OS interface suite.

MTOSI covers both service and resource level interfaces. At the resource

level, MTOSI includes interfaces for inventory, provisioning, fault

management, and performance management.

An interface towards e.g. performance data can be compliant with MTOSI,

and this is exactly what is proposed in Figure 3.

Another "competing" standard under TM Forum is OSS/J, but according to

findings this seems to be loosing support in the industry.

Official home page:http://www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/MultiTechnologyOperations/

2319/Home.html

Relevant case story:

http://www.tti-telecom.com/Data/Uploads/Case-Study-Orange-IL-

TMForum.pdf







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Figure 4: TM Forum Frameworx

Initiatives for standardisation of network management system interfaces comes from

two communities:

1. Traditional IT represented by major players such as IBM, HP, and Microsoft.

2. Telecommunications represented by TM Forum and major players such as

Ericsson and Deutsche Telecom.

In our list, ITIL and CIM belongs to the first community, whereas Frameworx and

MTOSI comes from the second one.

The reason for telecommunications developing their own initiatives is that from the

beginning their circuit-switched systems were quite different from IP-based computer

networks. Today, everything is IP-based, and there are initiatives to merge concepts

and standards from IT and telecom - e.g. the ongoing effort to merge ITIL (IT) and

eTOM (telecom).

Inputs from Management World 2011

2operate visited TM Forum's Management World conference on 23-26 May, 2011,

and brought home a number of findings relevant for this project.

1. MTOSI is the standard with the most industry support

After having had meetings with several representatives of TM Forum at theconference as well as one representative of INTRACOM - a provider of broadband

network systems - we conclude that MTOSI is the standard under TM Forum

Frameworx that has the greatest support and which could be utilized in satcom

domain. Other initiatives such as OSS/J seems to be loosing support, and the more

comprehensive SID framework seems relevant but also "heavy".

2. Major telecom operators are demanding vendors to adopt standards

Especially Deutsche Telecom was VERY strong in their message about

standardisation. During a keynote presentation, Steffen Röhn, CIO of Deutsche

Telecom Group, had one slide with the following content:







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Figure 5: Deutsche Telecom asks for standards!

• Call for action for our partners

• We need

◦ Solution combination (End to End) from the vendors to ensure the

transformation

▪ Standardized business processes

▪ Automation

▪ Harmonization

▪ TM Forum

The presented arguments for standardisation were similar to those presented as the

background of the StandardPM project - namely a more open market for network

management system components, fewer resources for system integration, and therebyreduced cost for the operator.

3. Implementation of standards in mobile telecommunications is not complete!

It was an assumption when starting the StandardPM project that in other

telecommunications areas the implementation of standards in performance

management was more mature than in satcom. During the execution of the project it

has become clear that although the level of maturity is higher - mainly because the

market is bigger and older - there are huge differences between individual

organisations. A lot of (old) operators are still very much developing their own

operations support system in-house based on legacy interfaces.

Generally, there is currently a lot of turbulence and cut-downs in telecommunications

following the financial crisis. Many organisations are having a short horizon

preventing a more long-term strategy on the use of standards. However, there are

initiatives for "business transformation" (as presented by Deutsche Telecom above)

which demands standards implementation.

Also, vendors of network equipment have traditionally kept interfaces confidential

(the only way to integrate was through an NDA with the operator). A major step

towards more openness was the announcement in February 2011 by Nokia-Siemens

Networks of open South-bound interfaces to the NetAct platform, as well as soon-to-

come open North-bound interfaces.







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DVB-RCS2 Higher Layers

The work in this project is highly related to ongoing DVB-RCS standardisation (TM-

RCS group), and the plan is now to align meet at the next meeting on September 14-

15 in London. TM-RCS has recently produced new DVB-RCS2 specification of so-

called Higher Layers, including network management interfaces.

Ongoing ARTES-1 Work

During the execution of the project it came to the attention of 2operate that a related

activity is ongoing under ARTES-1, namely the project titled " Efficient networking and MAC techniques in next generation interactive broadband satellite networks"

which was started in April 2011. The project aims to result in generic

recommendations on the use and implementation of optimised and efficient MAC and

networking techniques for interactive broadband satellite networks. These generic

recommendations will be made public in the form of white papers to the general

stakeholders in interactive broadband satellite networks. The activity is also intended

to provide inputs to the Implementation Guidelines for ETSI DVB-RCS2 Higher Layer Satellite (HLS) specification. Below is listed some key topics that will receive

particular emphasis in the project.

• Multi-vendor interoperability across higher layers of interactive broadband

satellite networks. Development of necessary MIBs and session control

protocols that can be used to negotiate between communicating parties the

higher layer solutions to be adopted in a session.

• Optimisation (in terms of throughput, Quality of Experience, responsiveness)

of higher layer techniques such as PEPs and header compression.

• Seamless integration of interactive broadband satellite networks withterrestrial access networks. This may necessitate development OSS interfaces

and associated MIBs, VLANs for integration with terrestrial ISPs and Telcos.

• Efficient integration of advanced Random Access (RA) techniques with

Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA), especially in SCADA and

large-scale consumer networks.







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3 Recommendations

Based on the analysis (interviews and investigation of existing standards), we

conclude the following:

Demand for Standardisation of Satcom Network Management Components

Just like operators of mobile networks (GSM, WCDMA, LTE), satcom operators need

standardisation to give them better access to a range of network management

applications - such as the 2solve auto-diagnostics toolset from 2operate.

System integrators also want standards to enable more efficient system integration.

They experience that operators do not want to pay for integration, and this limits them

in the solutions they can provide.

Equipment vendors in the satcom market will need to invest to achieve

standardisation, and it seems obvious that they are the more reluctant type of

stakeholder. Operators should motivate vendors to support standards - by putting clear

demands on the table, and by being willing to take part of the investment.

MTOSI and CIM

Based on investigations (see Section 2), we recommend MTOSI as the most obvious

choice for a standard to provide performance data from the telecom community.

Similarly, CIM seems to be the right choice if we see what is used in the IT

community.

It is out of scope of this project to develop prototypes of these two recommended

frameworks, but it would be the obvious next step (possible covered by the ongoing

ARTES-1 activity). A number of criteria could be defined to determine the best of the

two, but we believe that it will be hard to make a definite selection. In stead we

recommend vendors to listen to the demands of their customers. There will be some

that prefer one simply based on whether the organisation and its key staff feel that

they belong to the IT community or the telecom community. It is to be expected that

vendors will need to support both.







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4 Commercial Evaluation

What are the commercial benefits to the satcom community of the recommended

standardisation proposed in this study?It has been quite difficult to estimate exactly the effort spent in system integration for

satcom network management solutions. However, it is commonly agreed that

standardisation constitutes a means for reducing integration costs in network

management solutions deployment (see e.g. the article "CSPs: Standards to cut

integration costs and free up IT budgets" , Thursday, 12 May 2011, VanillaPlus

Magazine).

We agree that integration costs can be reduced, but there is more to it: when standard

interfaces to network equipment are made available, the market opens up for network

management system components in a similar way that the open Android platform has

opened up the mobile applications market. Increased competition and availability of new technology will probably mean more to the operator than the reduced integration

costs in reduced costs of network operations. It would be realistic to expect a rough

cost reduction of around 10% in network operations from better toolsets made

available by standards.

Research reports shows that around 15% of all costs in a mobile network operator is

network operations. For a Danish (small European) operator this means an annual cost

of EUR 100M. Satcom operators are typically much smaller, but still the costs of

network operations is a significant part of operational expenditures, and cost

reductions are very desirable.

Assuming a satcom operator with an annual budget of EUR 10M for network operations, the expected costs reductions would thus be in the order of EUR 1M.







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5 Conclusions

In this study, we have identified a strong need among satcom operators and system

integrators for standardisation of network management interfaces, in particular for performance management.

The need comes from a desire among operators to streamline the organisation to be

able to handle several types of networks at the same time (see e.g. Figure 3).

Moreover, there is a need to reduce integration costs of network management systems,

since system integrators experience that operators do not want to pay for integration,

and this puts constraints on the solutions that the system integrator is able to provide.

Finally, we conclude that having more standards implementation in the satcom

network management domain will open the market and enable operators (and system

integrators) to provide new technology (reuse technology from other telecom

domains) to increase the level of competition and reduce network operations costs for

the network operator.

It is recommended by this study to reuse existing standards, such as MTOSI and CIM

(from telecom and IT communities, respectively) to achieve standardisation of

performance management interfaces.

The challenge in bringing standardisation into the industry, however, is that

equipment vendors are not motivated to take on the investment of providing

standardised interfaces on their own. To make standardisation happen, operators as

well as integrators and network management system vendors should both provide

clear and explicit requirements and be willing to take a reasonable share of the

investment.




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