Case study: Mobile service survives seismic shifts
Cephalonia, famous as the setting for Louis de Bernières’ bestselling novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is to the west of mainland Greece, in the Ionian Sea. It has a population of 35,000 and an area of just over 300 square miles. Although there were no immediate reports of casualties, the earthquake that struck the island on January 26, 2014, was a strong one, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale. It hit areas where COSMOTE base stations were located, putting mobile coverage in jeopardy. In 2013 COSMOTE had chosen TM Forum’s Frameworx to develop a new Service Impact & Fault Correlation Network Operations Center (NOC) Platform. This was already delivering business benefits on a daily basis, but when the earthquake struck, the operator was able to swiftly assess the impact of the subsequent general electrical failure. Microwave transmissions had failed affecting 16 of the 30 base stations on the island. Seven of those 16 were out of service, with six operating on batteries and three on stand-by generators. Based on this information, plus the geographical position of the faults, fewer than ten minutes after the earthquake hit, field operation teams were informed and went to install portable generators in the two most critical sites, enabling optimal service restoration. The result was negligible service disturbance to the island’s mobile communications, despite the massive power outage. At a critical time, when the emergency services were trying to coordinate aid to devastated towns, COSMOTE played an important role in the delivery of disaster relief to tens of thousands of people.
“Even among catastrophic events – for example, Cephalonia’s earthquake – COSMOTE’s network had only minimum outages and provided very positive experience to its subscribers, helping them in the recovery process. This has had a positive impact on COSMOTE’s corporate image,” says Dr. Kostas Vlahodimitropoulos, Service Quality Management Deputy Director, COSMOTE.
Process analysis
Development of the platform was part of an ongoing program of innovation to investigate potential process improvements in critical organizational areas such as operations support and readiness, and assurance. Given the complex nature of multi-vendor and multi-technology transmission networks, it was essential to analyze processes across the company’s various business domains, including transmission planning and provisioning, transmission inventory, fault monitoring, service and circuit definition, transmission and radio network correlation, and fault impact root cause analysis. To this end, TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), which is part of Frameworx, was employed at all stages of the project to design relevant processes and clearly define the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform in terms of its business architecture, including defining the core processes of the new application. The Business Process Framework was used to describe the different entities involved in all the business process flows related to the platform and then to distil this information to identify operational process flows. The outcome of this work was a clear description of the application’s key purpose and the functions needed, and what limitations would apply. By applying the concept of process decomposition from the different levels of the Business Process Framework, COSMOTE analyzed where the new application fitted into the Operations Level. It identified Operations Support & Readiness, and Assurance, as the main focus areas and isolated Service Problem Management and Resource Trouble Management as the key business processes. The company also found that important aspects of the platform’s objectives related to Resource Data Collection & Distribution: Analysis revealed that this element of the process was fundamental to identifying and understanding the impact of service disturbance caused by transmission network faults. The key aspect of the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform is the handling of transmission-related faults and how these impact the rest of the radio network, and ultimately end service and coverage. Managing the relationship between the transmission network and the radio network was a big challenge in terms of data consistency in the inventory, and alignment of business processes and data flows. Again, the use of Business Process Framework helped the company identify the important pre-requisites needed for the processes, including what was missing in the original system architecture.
Modeling resource management
COSMOTE used Level 1 of the Resource Domain of TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) to model the combined transmission and radio network for resource management. It studied concepts and patterns from the LogicalResource Framework, such as ResourceSpecifications, to model the connection between physical transmission links and logical routing. It also made use of patterns such as Subclasses of LogicalResource due to the complex nature of the combined transmission and radio network. By using the principle of abstraction (hiding underlying complexity in entities/objects), COSMOTE built a model to define the complete track of logical connections for the transmission network, from the radio access network controllers down to the geographical coverage area of radio base stations. Using these definitions, the company could determine both a service, and the service impact of faults and trouble incidents, on particular network resource entities.
Identifying missing functionality
The operator relied on the Forum’s Application Framework (TAM) to identify the boundaries for features within the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform by analysing where there were missing or potentaily overlapping functionalities in the applications. For example, the analysis revealed where features were missing regarding the business process related to Service Problem Management and Resource Problem Management within the transmission and radio network. Under each category the detailed feature suggestions from the Application Framework were then analyzed to evaluate the match with COSMOTE’s Platform. This gave further input to the functionality roadmap and interoperation with other tools within the organization. This analysis was also the basis for defining data exchange and application program interfaces between the Platform and other tools and systems. Fault Correlation & Root Cause Analysis was defined as a key feature of the platform, while Automatic Fault Correction & Restoration was identified as an issue for future review. TM Forum best practices and standards, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA – Frameworx is built on these principles), SOAP and RESTful interfaces were used as points of reference for integrating COSMOTE’s original systems and data sources. The principles of Model Driven Architecture Specifications were utilized during the scoping and design work, and state-of-the-art interfaces such as Web Services were used to integrate the solution with the Central Assurance system.
Big business benefits
In terms of business benefits, as a result of implementing the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform across its operations, COSMOTE has:
According to the results of a Six Sigma project run by COSMOTE in 2013, the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform has contributed greatly to reducing resolution times for incidents in the mobile network and the net yearly business benefit was $42,000 for priority #1 incidents (urgent incidents, for example if a number of base stations are out of order). It was for $1,027,000 for priority #2 incidents (typically outages at more than one high-traffic base station) and $597,000 for priority #3 incidents (typically a single base station outage) – an overall total of $1,666,000.
Building on success
The expertise gained in implementing this project also led COSMOTE to initiate a new application for customer care agents. This enables them to identify in a single geographical view of how network incidents affect customer experience. The new project is based on the same architecture, has the same functionality as the Service Impact & Fault Correlation NOC Platform, and uses the same simplified information and enrichment from other domains to facilitate daily interactions with customers. Fault resolution times can now be precisely calculated and customer expectations can be managed.
“When customer care agents have accurate information about network coverage, mobile broadband speed, and voice and data services in a specific position on the map, they can notify the customers about the outage resolution time,” says Dr. Vlahodimitropoulos.
What are REST and SOAP?
REST (for representational state transfer) is a style of software architecture which exploits the established technologies and protocols of the web. Although sometimes REST and RESTful are used interchangeably, more accurately RESTful describes Web Services implementing such an architecture. Web Services describes a standardized way of integrating web-based applications using open Internet standards across infrastructure using the Internet Protocol (IP). Web Services allow organizations to communicate data without deep knowledge of each other’s IT systems behind the firewall. SOAP (for simple object access protocol) specifies protocols for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in IT networks. TM Forum is working with the world’s largest service providers and suppliers to develop REST-based APIs, which enable new services and the open digital ecosystem, and provide critical management functionality. This includes to digital services that rely on multiple partners and systems operating in a complex value chain. For more about the Forum’s open APIs, visit the new API Zone.