AUTOMATING TELECOM EQUIPMENT FOR CLOUD INTEGRATION

Integration of equipment in the cellular networks was always considered a challenge mainly due to the heterogeneous nature of architectures and compatibility problems that may arise from them. Testing and prototyping new services is always preceded by a big effort with the environment setup and while communication standards aim to provide a very strict guideline when it comes to offering telecom services they fail to establish a unified way of how these are provisioned within different equipment. As a result most equipment vendors offer custom equipment administration solutions that are better known as Operating Support Systems (OSS) that impose specific know-how and deal with proprietary provisioning workflows. In this article we present a brief survey of the operator challenges identified with the integration of telecom equipment. We explore the possibility of offering a Cloud based model of cellular network equipment, to help third party vendors achieve faster time to market when releasing new services. Lastly, we propose our vision towards a unified provisioning and aggregation system of both new and legacy traditional telecom equipment by abstracting proprietary provisioning workflows in a vendor-agnostic way.