Page 359 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-150 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

This process also deals with designing the network capability to meet a specified service need at the
desired cost and for ensuring that the network can be properly installed, monitored, controlled, and
billed. The process is also responsible for ensuring that enough network capacity will be available to
meet the forecasted demand and support cases of unforecasted demand. Based on the required network
capacity, orders are issued to suppliers or other network operators and site preparation and installation
orders are issued to the network inventory management or a third-party network constructor. A design
of the logical network configuration is provided to network provisioning.

3.6.6.4 Resource Provisioning
This process is part of Fulfillment, and the Resource Management and Operations as well.
Its purpose is to allocate and configure resources to individual customer service instances in order to
meet service requirements.
The process encompasses the configuration of the network, to ensure that network capacity is ready
for provisioning of services. It carries out network provisioning as required, to fulfill specific service
requests and configuration changes to address network problems. The process must assign and admin-
ister identifiers for provisioned resources and make them available to other processes. Note that the rou-
tine provisioning of specific instances of a customer service—in particular, simple services such as plain
old telephone service (POTS)—may not normally involve network provisioning, but may be handled
directly by service provisioning from a preconfigured set.
The processes encompass allocation and configuration of resources to individual customer service
instances in order to meet the service requirements, and includes activation as well as testing to ensure
the expected performance of the service.
The principal functions are:

• Allocate and Deliver Resources: Identify resources required to support a specific service instance.
Such allocation request can be placed as part of a preorder feasibility check, to see whether there
are adequate resources available to fulfill the request. In addition, the Allocate and Deliver
Resource processes will possibly ensure that the appropriate resources are delivered to the appro-
priate location for installation and configuration.
• Configure and Activate Resources: Configure and activate the resources reserved for supporting a
specific service instance. The Configure and Activate Resource processes can receive configura-
tion requests for adding, changing, and complementing services, as well as for fixing resource
troubles and adding resource capacity to cope with performance problems.
• Test Resources: The responsibility of this process is to test resources supporting a specific service
instance. The objective is to verify whether the resources work correctly and meet the appropri-
ate performance levels. If these tests succeed, the resources will be marked as in-service, which
means the resources are available for use.
• Update and Report on Resources: These processes ensure the Resource Inventory Database reflects
resources are being used for a specific customer.

Requirements for successful provisioning:
• Allocated resources must exist
• Resources must not be allocated to other services
• Physical location of resources must be known
• Physical and logical connections between resources must be known
• Requires that network elements are modeled into inventory system
• Requires extensive Network Element Interface (NEI) library from service fulfillment platform

It should be noted that NEI implementations vary a lot because there are no commonly accepted
standards. Many network elements are managed though Command Line Interface (CLI), which is easy
for humans, but problematic for machine-to-machine communication.