Service Assurance Process Re-Engineering Using Location-aware Infrastructure Intelligence

The continuous introduction of converged services such as VoIP and Video-On-Demand has created many operational challenges for service providers. In this paper, we describe how to use location-aware technologies, not only to integrate disparate management applications, but also to transform the underlying process to use geographical views as the focal point of management operations. Based on an engagement with a large Cable provider, we have designed and implemented 3i - Integrated Infrastructure Intelligence - to address key issues in the service assurance process. 3i is highly componentized and provides an intuitive way for creating role-based views through dynamic scoping, event aggregation and status projection, and location-driven active probing. We analyze the current service assurance process and compare it with the improved process after introducing 3i. Overall, the re-engineered process offers base execution improvements in alarm collection, problem drill-down and reporting, as well as complexity improvements throughout. 3i is a fully implemented tool and has demonstrated capabilities beyond its original intended scope as a decision support tool in planning and marketing functions.