Enhancing Service Fulfillment Using Network Service Orchestration

In the modern-day, the telecommunications industry is one of the most important sectors. It connects people and organizations across the globe, making communication simple and instant. Despite its significant progress over the past few decades, there are still plenty of innovations and technologies that promise to take telecommunications to a whole new level.

Digital Transformation World 2020 case study: Going codeless end-to-end to optimize the network and launch services fast. Watch the recording here.

Demand for telecom services is ever on the rise, and communications service providers are expected to offer uninterrupted and fast connections. This requires constant system and service upgrades. However, developing new services and deploying then to consumers is one of the main challenges network operators face as it takes too long.

Unlike IT service providers, network operators do not use automated and streamlined operational systems. This limits their capacity to deploy new services. Services are either hard-coded in operations support systems (OSS) or configured manually. As a result, implementing and deploying services is time-consuming and costly.

Network Functions Visualizations (NFV) and Software-defined Networking (SDN) promise to enhance operator service agility while reducing costs. However, their deployment will take too long. Before SDN and NFV can be effectively deployed, many organizational and network changes must be implemented. Ideally, network operators would prefer to gain all these benefits without waiting too long or compromising operations.

This is why there is increasing interest in network service orchestration layers among telecom operators. This layer sits between existing and well-established business support systems and operations support systems (BSS/OSS) and network devices. With a service orchestration layer in place, network providers can conduct immediate reconfiguration of networks, thus offering real-time responses to changing service and customer needs.

Undoubtedly, there is an urgent need for communications service providers to migrate to new technologies. This white paper offers an in-depth look at what role service orchestration layers can play in boosting the programmability and agility of networks, as well as what is required to set up an efficient service orchestration layer.

Network Operations Need to Be Streamlined

To deploy services faster and efficiently, there is a growing need for network providers to streamline operations. This can be achieved by addressing the following areas.

Service Agility

According to a Heavy Reading research, the surging demand for NFV and SDN is primarily linked to the need for increased service agility. This is one area that operators lag behind compared to over-the-top (OTT) competitors. For app developers and cloud providers, it takes hours, at most days, to deploy new services. On the other hand, network operators take weeks or months to develop and deploy new services.

Ultimately, NFV and SDN will offer telecommunications providers this agility. However, they take too long to develop and deploy. Also, it requires substantial investments and replacing the present infrastructure. Presently, such investments are not warranted as the lifecycles of telco equipment are yet to run their course.

On matters of agility, operators need to approach it in two dimensions. These are:

• Design Agility- Entails replacing rigid service structures that require hard-coding with agile ones. This will enable operators to add new services to their portfolios quickly.
• Operational Agility- Involves identifying ways to adjust services on demand and minimize the barriers to rapid service delivery, such as order fallout and manual processes. This allows operators to deliver services to customers much faster.

Operational Costs

The price of network equipment has been gradually reducing. Paradoxically, operators’ operational costs have been rising due to the expensive nature of managing and adjusting network equipment. As such, waiting for the deployment of SDN and NFV for operational costs to reduce is not an option. To minimize expenses promptly, operators need to evaluate and clean up the most significant management costs in their networks.

Challenges With Service Fulfillment

When it comes to improving service fulfillment, operators have identified provisioning as the main area to invest in operations service systems. Some of the main reasons that limit the provisioning and activation capacities of networks are listed below.

Inadequacies in the Approach to Service Delivery

When it comes to provisioning services, many operators rely on manual methods. This involves typing configuration changes into boxes or launching scripts by specialists in the proprietary command-line interfaces (CLIs). Others use scripting and provisioning, which affords engineers greater flexibility when implementing services.

Alternatively, the services implemented by some operators are those that are hardcoded in their OSS. Though this approach supports automation, it does not offer much when it comes to flexibility. Any time service definitions need to be adjusted or new elements added to the network, the operator must call their OSS vendor to execute the changes.

Adapter Proliferation

Both homegrown and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multi-vendor OSSs offer better network abstraction and overcome the silo problem. They rely on an adapter layer to translate between specific vendor CLIs and the high-level OSS to drive the activation of individual devices programmatically.

These adapters are proprietary devices from vendors that take time to develop for new features in existing equipment. Also, to develop a new adapter, vendors are required to initiate new software projects. All these elements push the cost of developing adapters high, which is then transferred to operators.

Order Fallout Due to Data Inconsistency

Operators lack a real-time view of the state of their network. This is regardless of whether they use tools or manual processes for service fulfillment. Much of this limitation is owed to the fact that these systems were designed for the ‘fire and forget’ era when service changes were less frequent.

With a fast-changing network environment and a lack of strong governance in relation to network configuration, data inconsistencies between local and centralized data networks are increasing. As a result, operators are faced with order fallouts and provisioning delays, which are expensive to address.

Provisioning Mindset

Before the emergence of virtual IT services, enterprises were accustomed to the lengthy processes telcos use for service provisioning. However, with the taste of faster and efficient service provisioning, enterprises now expect the same from network providers.

However, this has proven to be a significant challenge for telecommunications service providers as they are still reliant on the same outdated provisioning approaches. Operators must now transition from one-off provisioning services to those that enable a continuous process of service change.

Network Service Orchestration

As the telecommunications sector becomes more digitized, network service orchestration is emerging as a suitable replacement for provisioning. Network service orchestration allows operators to configure complex network services from end to end across a diverse network. It facilitates this by automating the end-to-end process and enabling real-time changes of services by carrying out all the equipment configuration changes necessary. As such, it offers a responsive solution suitable for the evolving nature of customer demand.

In provisioning matters, network service orchestration is not similar to workflow management and business process management. It is a modeled and automated transaction that takes place in real-time, unlike the others, which are manual and take long.

Service Orchestration:

• It offers intelligence that is unavailable with generic workflow engines and is aware of the present configured state of services.
• Understands what it needs to do in case something disrupts the completion of a transaction.
• It does not require human intervention to resolve issues.

What Is Needed for a Network Service Orchestration Layer?

For operators to gain confidence in automated programmatic configuration changes and capitalize on network service orchestration, there are key areas to pay attention to.

Develop a Model-Driven View of Services and Necessary Configurations

Service models are essential in deploying a network service orchestration layers successfully. They make it easy for operators to design new services and make adjustments to existing services without affecting the network and design agility.

The network service orchestration layer breaks down service models into their constituent resources each time they are provisioned into the network. It then conducts a translation of the service’s complex configuration into each device’s unique configuration commands.

Along with initiating service provisioning instances, network service orchestration layers maintain and modify the configurations as needed. With such continuous support, it reduces the duration of supporting services from months to minutes.

Model-Driven View of Devices

The ability to translate between device-specific configuration and the service model’s views is essential. As such, service and device configuration needs should be modeled using the same language, preferably a standard one.

Transactionality

All the simultaneous and programmatic configurations for all the devices should be carried out as a single atomic transaction. If one attempt to configure a device fails, the whole service will be compromised.

With transactionality, all the configurations associated with a service are either committed or rolled back entirely. This reduces the risk of order fallout as it preserves data consistency.

Network Service Orchestration Layers and Migration to SDN and NFV

For network operators, SDN and NFV promise a more agile future. A network service orchestration layer does not act as a replacement but a bridge that allows you to gain service agility and reduce costs while preparing you to migrate to SDN and NFV. To put it simply, it helps operators address the present operational challenges while ensuring they are better placed to adopt virtualized networks.

Digital Transformation World 2020 case study: Going codeless end-to-end to optimize the network and launch services fast. Watch the recording here