Invoking their charter

Cooperation and openness are not the most notable behavioral traits among competing network equipment manufacturers, but a core group has come together under the dome of the TeleManagement Forum to work together on reducing the complexity of multi-vendor network management.

The group, known as the Co-operative Open OSS Project, or CO-OP, was launched in October at the TeleManagement World Conference in Long Beach, Calif. Its first deliverables are due at TMW in Nice, France, next month. And Juha Lipiainen, chairman of the CO-OP steering council and director of business development for operations support systems (OSSs) at Nokia on his day job, said things are going well.

The group was formed by five of the largest equipment manufacturers: Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens. It was joined last month by Alcatel, Huawei, Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks.

The over-arching goal of the CO-OP is to simplify the integration of network equipment and management systems in the multi-vendor networks of wireless operators. Members will collaborate on common peer-to-peer architecture specifications and testing of OSSs. They also hope to agree on common application interfaces and procedures for fault management, performance management and configuration management.

“Besides the specification work, we are also working on two demos, which will be part of the Catalyst program at TMW,” Lipiainen said. The Catalyst Showcase consists of several multi-phased proof-of-concept demonstrations. The CO-OP project will focus on configuration in the radio access network and performance management using common key performance indicators (KPI) from multiple vendors.

“Configuration management will look at how cell parameters are adjusted in multi-vendor networks in areas where two vendors' operators are colliding,” Lipiainen said. “And the other will show how to use common KPIs so they express their status and performance in the same terms and parameters.”

As for the progress of the group, the CO-OP hopes to deliver a first-phase specification to the TMF in three weeks in Nice. The group also should have common 2G KPIs implemented and published by then.

The CO-OP has set goals for October this year and May the following, coinciding with TMF events. By October, the group plans to have testing and verification practices established, a second set of specifications and the first CO-OP certified products. By May 2006, it hopes to have a large-scale commercial CO-OP deployment. Martin Creaner, chief technology officer for the TMF, called the CO-OP “a TMF project on steroids” and says it is moving pretty fast for this type of thing — this type of thing being rather unusual in the class of its participants, their competitive relationship and the speed at which the group hopes to accomplish its goals.

Unusual, but not unprecedented, Lipiainen said.

“We have quite a good history of working together. Consider all the mobile standards created by this group,” he said.

He also pointed to cooperation that resulted in interoperability between network elements and handsets, although he acknowledged that was mostly in a pre-competitive environment.

Creaner said there is a high level of cooperation among these vendors but that every company keeps a careful eye on what is a common area of shared non-differentiating interest and what is an area where they feel they have differentiation.

Larry Goldman, partner and co-founder of OSS Observer, said there are certain things vendors do in terms of managing equipment in the network that are standard for everybody, so a certain amount of standardization makes sense.

However, he said, it won't be easy.

“You would like to see them achieve their goals, but history says it isn't very likely. The concept has been put forth before but hasn't worked out because getting people who otherwise are competing to agree on something is a tough thing to do,” Goldman said.

Regarding Lipiainen's statement about working together on standards, Goldman said it's a good argument, but in the world of network management, it's difficult.

Goldman said interoperability is not as important as the work the group is doing on configuration management, particularly at the customer premises equipment (CPE) level.

“Companies like Nokia see what is coming next, and they are specifically concerned with handsets and other CPE, things that aren't in the network themselves but that they have to deal with,” he said.

Goldman acknowledged, though, that they have bigger issues than handsets but that configuring the basic functionality performed on handsets is a unique issue that hasn't been addressed before.

The big issue, Goldman said, is for the group to move along at a reasonable pace. And, he said, the TMF is probably the best place to do it.

“The TMF's cooperative agreement with the ITU-T validates that this is the organization to take this work to. The question is, can you get enough of the right players to come together and do the hard work to make agreements that actually pay off for everybody?”

That's one of the things that distinguishes this group from other working groups. The TMF has set up a separate steering committee and has dedicated a full-time project manager out of Dallas to keep things on track. The group has set aggressive goals and has in its charter specific guidelines for participation under their rules of engagement.

“We set a target of achieving rapid progress and specifications so that each company that wished to participate committed dedicated resources, not best-effort resources, and accelerated funding,” Creaner said.

Ultimately, as a practical implementation of the TMF's New Generation Operations Systems and Software framework, the CO-OP will deliver an interface specification that defines a CO-OP interface, a “business case/use case” that describes business problems it is solving, a reference implementation, a technology compatibility kit and other tools (see table).

It's the first time this accelerated format has been tried within the TMF.

“It won't be the last.” Creaner said.“We fully expect to take this model we have followed with CO-OP and use it for accelerating our approach to other problems.”

Some of those problems include billing and revenue assurance. The TMF also is considering a project on operational benchmarking.

“I give the TMF a great deal of credit for going after the problems that can be dealt with and getting results where they can,” Goldman said.

Planned CO-OP deliverables

BUSINESS CASE/USE CASE (UC) — description of the actual business problem being addressed

INTERFACE SPECIFICATION (IS) — an unambiguous syntactical technology independent definition of a CO-OP Interface

SOLUTION SET (SS) — an unambiguous syntactical technology-specific definition of a CO-OP Interface

REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION (RI) — a prototype implementation of the respective IS and SS that exercises all aspects of the CO-OP Interface but may be limited in reliability, scalability and availability

TECHNOLOGY COMPATIBILITY KIT (TCK) — the suite of tests, tools and documentation that allows an implementer of a CO-OP Interface to determine and prove that the implementation is compliant with the respective IS and SS

TESTING PROCEDURES (TP) — procedures required to test and certify the compliancy of products that support CO-OP interfaces

DEMONSTRATION SYSTEMS — a proof of technology and approach for marketing, industry understanding and internal communication

White papers, design guidelines, user's guides, functionality descriptions and other documents will be produced as the need arises.

Source: Co-operative Open OSS Project