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Networking Research and Education

A lightweight OSS/BSS
architecture
Moving up the value chain in operations

Yannis Mitsos
TTC meeting
Amsterdam, 23rd November 2015
Material produced by Afrodite Sevasti
6th Service and Technology Forum
Paris, 3-4th November 2015
The rational

3
 GRNET as a service provider

23/11/2015 A lightweight OSS/BSS architecture 4

 Portfolio
• R&E backbone • IaaS/Cloud computing
– Carrier L2 – VM and cloud services
– ROADM-capable L1 – Virtual Machines service
– L2 VPN on demand (ViMa)
– L1 optical trails (OTN) on demand – Virtual private servers on
demand
• High Performance Computing – ~okeanos cloud services
– National HPC Infrastructure – VMs on demand
– HPC services – Storage services

• Middleware • Applications
– Digital Certificate Services – HD Video Conferencing (more
– AAI and federated AAI (eduGAIN) than 15K meetings held)
• Security – epresence
CSIRT/CERT services – Live Streaming (~27.000
subscribers)
–

Coordination of incident handling with

e-Voting (ZEUS)
–
national authorities –

– Firewall on demand – Adacemic IDs

– Flow-based monitoring as a Service
– SIEM as a Service
– IDS/IPS as a Service 6
 The service era
• 1,000s -> 10,000s of end users
– Direct access to individuals IMAGE
– Multiple levels of customer relations within
institutions
• NOCs and service managers
• *-as-a-Service
– VPN as a Service
– Infrastructure as a Service
– Firewall as a Service
– Flow monitoring as a Service
– ...
• Composite services/service bundling
• Rapid uptake of services
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(Some of) Τhe requirements
 Service portfolio management
 Order management
 Orchestration
 Composable services
 Service assurance
 SLA management
 Re-usability of OSS capabilities
?
Integration
with other
 User analysis and retention SPs and e-
Infras
 Reduced system integration efforts
 Targeted marketing
 Accounting

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 Legacy architecture
Service Α silo Business
support
Self-
service Service Β silo
Provisio
ning Service D silo
Stats
Self-
service Service C silo
Monit
oring Self-
SLA mgmt
Service service
CRM Monitoring Self-service

Provi- Moni-
Service-specific
support systems
Provisioning Provisioning sioning toring

Vendor –specific
provisioning system/ API

SPACE

ECI Lightsoft
OSS ecosystem: infrastructure services
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 Wish list
 Consolidation of the OSS-BSS
architecture
• Modular and service oriented
• Isolate operations from business services

Manage services on top

• Standards’ based

of resources
 A coherent data model (‘vocabulary’)
 Reusable APIs
 Orchestration
– Multi-domain, multi-tenant services
– Service bundles
 Consistency in inter-module Consolidate processes &
communication systems
– Reliable, ‘any-to-any’
 One-stop shop for services
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 A lightweight OSS/BSS architecture

23/11/2015 A lightweight OSS/BSS architecture 14

 Enforce the split
• One-stop shop
• AAI integration
Business/Service • Service (& SLA) management SP to SP business
integration
Support Systems • Order management
• Accounting
• CRM
Standardized interfaces
Limitless
Service Bus business/
• Reliable messaging
operational
Μiddleware • Orchestration
requirements
Service Bus • Composition supported
Standardized interfaces

• Standardized interfaces within

Operations the OSS layer SP to SP operational

Support Systems • Modularity integration

• Resource facing services

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Service Bus – easy integration
Middleware
OSS

Service Bus BSS

• Routing of messages between applications/systems

• Mediation services
• Standardization
– Unifies data encapsulation and transportation syntaxes under TMF notation
• Reliability: Fault tolerance, load balancing and high availability
• Stateless: Embedding the state of the message into the message itself

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 Orchestration middleware
• Coordinates the business functions
across provisioning, inventory, issue
tracking support systems
– Feasibility, fulfillment, monitoring
orders
– Orchestration of actions to fulfill
• Order data validation-enrichment
• Orchestration plan
– Managing sequence and
dependencies
• Invokes fulfillment systems
• Order state owner
– Tracks order’s state and history
– Make information available to other
systems
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 Middleware of choice

• Open-source, free business process framework

– concept of a state machine
– backed by Alfresco
• Lightweight database model and multi-database
support
• Robust REST API
• Standard BPMN2.0
• Visual modeling
• Auto-versioning
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 Architecture overview
BSS layer

Service
Service A

Service B
Self-

Service C
Self-service Self-service CRM
service
Management
Simplified TMF service operations
Service Bus
Middleware
Service Bus
Simplified TMF resource/infrastructure operations

Provisioning Resource Resource Provi- Moni-

A

monitoring inventory

C
Service-specific sioning toring
services services Provi-sioning

B
A

support systems
OSS layer

Vendor management
system/ API

SPACE

ECI Lightsoft

OSS ecosystem: resource/infrastructure services

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 The OSS/BSS architecture in action:
L2 VPN service

23/11/2015 A lightweight OSS/BSS architecture 29

The service provider

 GRNET is a carrier network

 GRNET S.A. is required to
deliver on-demand L2 VPNs to
its end users in coordination
with campus NOCs
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 The service
End-user or campus NOC requests a L2 VPN between a local
site and a remote end-user site or campus

• Configurable variables:
– Payload type (untagged, single .1q, any .1q)
– Permission to rewrite VLAN IDs
– Use of a existing port or provisioning of a
new one
– MTU size
– VLAN id
• Challenges
– Multi-party provisioning
– Seamless experience to the user
– Integration with established operational
processes
– Reliable provisioning at the OSS layer
– Reconciliation of service design parameters
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 Actors and order items

Customer/Service Order Items

Customer Facing
Services
(BSS Layer)

Resource Facing
Services
(OSS Layer)
Provisioning/Resource Order Item

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L2 VPN service- L2 VPN workflow
specific
modules

OSS modules

Reusable
services

BSS modules
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 L2 VPN Support Systems: 10k ft view
User request

L2 VPN Self-Service Service Management CRM

Portal Platform AAI
(one-stop-shop)
Service SLA mgmt
Simplified TMF L2VPN
service order
Service Bus
Middleware
Service Bus
Simplified TMF L2VPN resource order
L2 VPN service
L2 VPN Provisioning Core
monitoring

Inventory Connector Service - configurations Monitoring service

L2 VPN 
 L2 VPN Support Systems: 10k ft view
User request

L2 VPN Self-Service Service Management CRM

Portal Platform AAI
(one-stop-shop)
Service SLA mgmt
Simplified TMF L2VPN
service order
Service Bus
Middleware
Service Bus
Simplified TMF L2VPN resource order
L2 VPN service
L2 VPN Provisioning Core
monitoring

Inventory Connector Service - configurations Monitoring service

L2 VPN 
Middleware insight

36
Technologies

Service Bus
Μiddleware
Service Bus

Junos PyEZ

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Lines of code

• SSP (BSS)
– Frontend: 1,880
– Backend: 1,700
• Provisioning (OSS)
– Total: 1,240
• Common: 570

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 What next?
• Service Management Platform as proxy SP
– OSS/BSS architecture integration
– Request/incident management
– Accounting/SLA support
• OTN-based optical trail provisioning
– Data plane: ECI’s Apollo family, Layer 0 and Layer 1 (OTN)
– Management plane: LightSoft NMS
– ‘On-demand lightpaths’ service
• ViMa (GRNET VPS service) integration
• Real-time services integration
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The end

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