A Service-Oriented Fault-Tolerant Environment for Telecom Operation Support Systems

The complexity that telecommunications companies are faced with in their Operations Support Systems (OSSs) is especially apparent in their billing systems. These systems are required to handle large volumes of data located on different legacy systems operating on heterogeneous platforms. These systems are often integrated using service oriented architecture (SOA). The successful completion of billing processes is essential to the operation of a telecommunications company, as it ensure the smooth inflow of income from services rendered. When a billing process fails it is the generally the result of one of two types of faults - availability faults or reliability faults. Unless the system has been designed with fault-tolerance in mind, failures constitute an extremely costly and time consuming occurrence. This paper proposes a Service Oriented Fault Tolerant Environment (SOFTEN) that seeks to address this problem directly. The SOFTEN described here is composed of three key modules: a Fault Tolerant Proxy (FT Proxy), Fault Tolerant Services (FT Services), and an Adaptable Service Bus (ASB). The FT Proxy allows developers to define strategies and responses for dealing with the occurrence of both availability and reliability faults. FT Services are fault handling mechanisms that enact the procedures established in the FT Proxy. The ASB provides intelligent routing and data transform between the billing process and the billing services. Further, the paper presents results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution, both in increasing reliability and in reducing calculation time for completion of the billing process. An implementation of this system has been operational at the ChungHwa Telecom Company, in Taiwan since May 2008 and provides complete support for its billing application. As a result, the billing process cycle time has been reduced from 10-16 days to 3-4 days, which cleared the way for further growth of the business.