OSS and BSS Systems

OSS (Operational Support Systems)

Software (occasionally hardware) applications that support back-office activities which operate a telco’s network, provision and maintain customer services. OSS is traditionally used by network planners, operations, architects, support, and engineering teams in the service provider. Increasingly product managers and senior staff under the CTO or COO may also use or rely on OSS to some extent.


BSS (Business Support Systems)

Software applications that support customer-facing activities. Billing, order management, customer relationship management, call centre automation, are all BSS applications. BSS may also encompass the customer-facing veneer of OSS application such as trouble-ticketing and service assurance – these are back-office activities but initiated directly by contact with the customer.


OSS/BSS Structure

Communication between OSS and BSS

Apart from service assurance activities being cross-OSS-BSS processes, there are as many overlapping functions as there are clean integration points between the two domains.


Why OSS?

All network elements (like routers and servers) are usually managed through vendor-specific network managing system (NMS, a computer program that communicates with network equipment to set it up), while typical business processes (for instance, activation of VoIP service, or building of office to office VPN, or VLAN) requires interaction with several pieces of equipment. So it makes sense to have a platform-independent basement, OSS core (usually Resource and Service Inventory from independent OSS vendor, like NetCracker, Cramer, MetaSolv or Granite), and integrate it with vendor-specific NMS’es from another. As a result, OSS database contains / has access to records about Network objects, connections between them and their statuses.


A Typical OSS

CRM With OSS

Having integrated CRM with OSS, a service provider can automate each customer’s order decomposition into a set of Network configuration steps through NMS’es (plus some manual employee’s operations like cabling). Most of network elements configuration commands are typically done and tracked by computers. Employees can also be part of the order workflow, to authorize some tasks or record results of manual operations, but it isn’t illustrated here for the sake of simplicity.


Flow of CRM Order thru the OSS

WRAN OSS solution

The figure above shows a typical WRAN (Wireless Radio Access Network) solution. The cloud in green represents location area of an RNC. There are multiple RBS within and RNC. the link between RNC and RBS is represented by Iub.


MO Relationships and its affect in OSS

MOs are related to each other and OSS needs to maintain the relationship between them and synchronize with the MOs to reflect the latest state of the network. For example in the figure above a Rnc finction MO containd IubLink which are referred in the UtranCell and RncModule MOs. Any change in IubLink must be notified to the the MOs referring it for appropriate cascading effect.


Responsibilities of OSS

Syncing of nodes with the application
Notification to the respective RNC about any changes in the NEs
Maintaining Logs
Parallel activation



Typical components of an OSS

• Plan activation area.
• Support for Online and offline mode updating.
• Support of Bulk updating.
• Restoring the NE to a previous state.
• Configuration management and Syncing nodes.
• Viewing and managing the NEs.

Workflow

This is a self explanatory Workflow diagram.


Database

While making any changes in the database first of all a copy of the database is created and the changes are made in the copy. The changes ate then validated. Only when the validation passes the changes in the copy are merged in the database.

References

http://etutorials.org/Networking/network+management/
http://www.simpleweb.org/tutorials/tmn/