P806

EQoS - A Common Framework for QoS/Network Performance in a multi-Provider Environment

closed

Apart from Functionality and Price, service quality (SQ) is now becoming an increasingly important aspects for customers in the competitive telecommunications market. Service level agreements (SLA) are becoming more common but differ between and within the service providers(SP).

ITU-T, ISO, ETSI, ETNO, IEEE, TINA-C and many others have defined parameters for service quality and network performance ( ITU: QoS Quality of Service, and NP Network Performance ). However, the multitude of these parameters, and the fact that there is no common interpretation of them creates communication difficulties between the customer and the SP. Another problem of many SLAs is the fact that various functional aspects or attributes of a service are treated as service quality rather than to what extent those aspects are within contract. In other words:

• It is not easy for a customer to compare SQ offers of different providers. The different providers may express their offers using different parameters or interpretation .
• In a multi-operator/provider environment a provider buying capacity from another provider may have difficulties in guaranteeing a certain service quality to his customer since different providers may measure SQ in different ways.

It is a priori assumed that the EURESCOM shareholders handle QoS better than their competitors, due to their QoS and NP awareness, and their competence in planning, operation and maintenance. However, increased customer requirements, intensified competition within Europe, and EU initiatives like Open Network Provisioning (ONP) will create a need for a well defined service quality interface between the customer and the service provider.

Service quality interface means in P806 service quality interactions taking place between customer and provider. A customer may be an end–user or a provider in a multi-provider environment.

The advantage of having a common quality interface between PNOs and their suppliers is already understood and established as a result of EURESCOM initiative and consensus work – and implemented through the EIRUS (European IPQM and RQMS Users) organisation.

A similar initiative and consensus process is in demand as regards a common service quality interface between customer and provider - keeping in mind the generic core structure needed to cope with rapid development in commercial, logical, and physical basis for service provision. Characteristics in this interface have to be unambiguously related to other characteristics of other interfaces of a generic service quality and network performance structure serving as basis for developing SP-specific systems for efficient handling of failures within present or future services

Objectives

This Project attempted to:

• Define a common SQ framework for a multi-provider environment. This means:
• Investigating international standards, de facto standards and work being done in different fora a Customer-Provider service quality interface will be defined. (The scope and interpretation of the term ‘Service Quality’ used in the Project will be defined) This interface should be useful when customers negotiate with providers and define the core of SLA. The generic core of the interface should be service- and technology- independent and consists of a limited set of major parameters .
• Establishing a common service quality framework/structure useful in an ONP, multi-operator/provider service provisioning environment This framework should allow unambiguous relation of the Customer-Provider service quality characteristics of the interface to network performance parameters or interfaces
• Develop and investigate interconnect scenarios based on the Internet and Intelligent Network, describing the interfaces between and within providers with respect to the traffic characteristics, performance variables, measurement schemes and reaction patterns. This investigation will assess the applicability of and advise improvements to objective (1)

• Propose data management models that can be used to verify SLAs in objective (2).

It should be noted that the ambition was not to provide a complete set of details for the framework but to provide a limited set of major definitions and structure which can be used as a starting point for further