Service provisioning and management in Telecom environments using active network technology

The advent of Telecom over the last years brought up many challenges to service providers. The difficulty to offer services and, at the same time, to perform their management requires an integrated solution for both, service provisioning and management. In this paper, we outline an infrastructure to perform such tasks. This infrastructure allows to create Virtual Active Networks (VANs) and install services in Telecom environments based on the Active Networking technology. Besides service provisioning, the infrastructure performs some management functions taking into account mobile services. The management system is based on a mobile agent platform and considers the management of VANs, where services can migrate from a VAN to another. Some aspects about the implementation of a prototype we developed to test our approach are presented. In this prototype we focus on three specific management areas: accounting, performance monitoring and configuration.