Operation management of IP broadband access networks

The last several years have seen significant advances in broadband access technology, including greater bandwidth, improved quality of service capabilities, multicast, and better applications availability. Customers today have several choices of broadband access technologies, namely Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL), Cable, wireless, and most recently Ethernet or Fiber to the home or business, as the first/last mile access is now an emerging technology gaining significant momentum specially Europe and Asia Pacific. Ensuring profitability from these services requires a comprehensive service management architecture that enables service providers to carefully plan, quickly provision, efficiently operate, and accurately bill these services. Once the user is connected to the network, service providers must monitor and ensure the Quality of Service. In this paper, we first provide an overview several IP broadband access technologies including Ethernet to the home/business, IP DSL, Wireless, and Cable. We then define an integrated Operation Support Systems/Network Management Systems (OSS/NMS) architecture including description of fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security management functions. Several traffic-engineering algorithms are then discussed and simulation results are compared. Finally, an intelligent capacity allocation algorithm for IP network is introduced. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.