Load balanced telecommunication event consumption using pools

Management systems increasingly consume events, giving them a more real-time view of the networks they are managing. Providing an event forwarding mechanism between the management system component that consumes events and application instances is a challenge. Such a mechanism must forward events in a manner that ensures correct delivery and is scalable, reliable, and efficient. This paper describes an approach that uses pools of event consumers and application instances to receive events being sent to a network management system from network elements in a telecommunication network. The use of pools allows the task of processing incoming events to be balanced across the members of the pool. The size of the pools can be automatically modified to cope with the current event load. The approach has been used in a proof of concept management event processing system installed on two live mobile networks.