Automating network configuration tasks using multi-level modeling

In today's rapidly changing market an operator needs to introduce new offerings faster and at a lower cost than its competitors. This requires network configuration tasks to be highly automated. However, current network configuration methods have limitations: they use direct-input commands, which is a primitive method that is inflexible and hard to automate, have inadequate modeling and thus cannot represent complex relations and dependencies, and are hard-coded with the underlying model so that model change causes error-prone code change. This paper proposes a general approach for automating network configuration tasks using multi-level modeling: the first level represents the underlying domain; the next level, the inter-relations between models, and the third level, the configuration task business logic. Using multi-level models, a generic engine can be built to auto-generate executable configuration commands. A prototype has been implemented for a UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). When tested on a set of representative configuration tasks, the implementation effort and duration are significantly reduced. (C) 2008 Alcatel-Lucent.