Network Discovery

Background

Keeping an accurate network inventory at any Telecom company is always a challenge. Though each company has a network inventory system, the sources of data to the inventory system are not accurate. Moreover, the network is changing faster and hence IT systems have challenges keeping up with them. There are several Network Discovery tools available but they are very costly and need customization with every new type of device and new device vendor

Challenge

Our client planned to launch Pico, eFemto, and Mini-Macro cells to expand its network coverage. Deployments of such small cells are significantly faster than the traditional sites. Moreover, changes to network configurations are much more frequent due to the evolving technology as compared with traditional networks. Newer device manufacturers are introduced within a short time. Hence, the need was for a solution that can be agile and adapt to an ever-changing network without sacrificing accuracy.

Our Solution

workMETHODS analyzed several Element Management Systems. Our professionals designed a highly configurable solution that integrates with EMSs and performs network discovery. Our solution provided a data-driven approach which will simplify the complexities of analyzing large EMS files.

Through a user-friendly interface, administrators can configure the EMS interfaces. Data entities/nodes and attributes between EMS and Network Management System are mapped. Business rules are defined to ensure data integrity and quality.

According to the configuration, our solution interacts with the solution. The solution supports several data exchange formats including XML and CSV formats. Additionally, solution interacts with EMSs which support web services for data exchanges.

The solution components utilize parallel processing and request queueing to improve performance. Large files in the range of 2-3TB are processed with 2 hours. Nested web service calls can be configured. The solution works with multiple vendor EMSs and multiple instances of each EMS to execute the discovery in parallel