BT Technology Journal

The customer handling intermediate server (CHIS) project is seeking to pioneer the implementation of key elements of a three-tier client/server architecture for BT‘s operational support systems (OSS). CHIS makes comprehensive use of the Open Group‘s Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). The paper explains the justification for CHIS, outlines its scope and design principles, and discusses the practical difficulties, both technical and managerial, which have been experienced in its initial stages, and the solutions adopted.

This paper describes an approach to support OSS integration across organisational boundaries. The requirement for such B2B interfaces is expected to increase as is the need to carry out integration in a much more flexible way. Existing approaches for integration tend to be implementation specific, operate at the syntactic level, and are realised by program code. Consequently they are inflexible due to their highly coupled nature and are costly to set up and maintain. An approach to decouple B2B interfaces is introduced, which allows them to be flexibly coupled as required with the use of scalable, semantic mediation. A prototype based on an assurance integration scenario for BT Wholesale’s B2B gateway is described.

B2B commerce requires interoperable product catalogues. Current practice through standardising appears to be ineffective. Actually, the proliferation of standards today is the major barrier to participation in B2B commerce for both sellers and buyers. This paper discusses the requirements and issues in catalogue management for B2B commerce, and the limitations of currently available solutions. It describes an ontology-based approach to catalogue management which enables suppliers to prepare their catalogues once and automatically publish them in many formats. Instead of standardising product catalogues, it allows suppliers to differentiate their products from those of their competitors. It goes on to describe a system that has been developed to take heterogeneous product descriptions and unify them for consumption by both end users and applications, allowing instant content exchange, thereby suiting the dynamic nature of eCommerce.

New business opportunities have emerged for network operators to offer a new generation of interfaces directly to solution providers that expose information and control in various intelligent networks. The paper describes the commercial rationale and operational benefits of these application level interfaces. The Parlay Group has defined application programming interfaces (APIs) to expose network capabilities including wireline, mobile, IP QoS, and messaging to external enterprises. The Parlay Group and the API specification are described together with an illustration of how the API could be used to create an enterprise workflow solution that integrates capabilities in different networks.

Network overloads can seriously degrade the quality or availability of telecommunications services if they are not effectively controlled. This paper explains why overload controls are required and how they should behave for both today's and future networks. The requirements of overload controls are presented, in terms of the conditions under which they must operate and the behaviour they should exhibit. Good design principles are proposed, which include identifying the controlled variable, the control structure, convergence and stability, and parameter configuration, while ensuring that different implementations work together. Relevant network standards are highlighted, and the paper stresses the crucial importance that these standards adequately specify the behaviour of overload controls.

As computational resources become available for use over the Internet, a requirement has emerged to reconfigure servers to an optimal allocation to cope with an unpredictable flow of incoming jobs. This paper describes an architecture that allows the dynamic reconfiguration of servers to process incoming jobs by switching servers between conceptual pools. The system makes use of heuristic policies to make close-to-optimal switching decisions. A prototype system which builds on existing resource management software has been developed to demonstrate some of the concepts described.