Building semantically rich network management interfaces

As mobile operators´ requirement to reduce their cost base becomes a key business driver, so does the need to reduce the time and effort associated with the management of network equipment. Within the telecommunication industry this is referred to as OPEX (operating expenditure). From a radio network perspective the majority of OPEX related expenditure comes from network configuration, optimization and planning, thus the key is to explore new approaches in these areas. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on ontologies to capture network information as well as the domain and expert knowledge needed to represent configuration tasks. After semantically enriching the representation of the 3G radio access network we show how formal ontology modeling techniques can be used to build smart configuration-aware network management interfaces, and thus reduce OPEX related to configuration management. The core of our analysis is based on findings during the development of an industrial proof-of-concept in the WCDMA domain