Understanding the effectiveness of open standards for providing access to functions in next generation networks

Abstract

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The traditional telecommunications environment is 'closed', where applications can only be developed internally with specific knowledge of individual network technologies. In the last several years, there has been an enormous increase in efforts to 'open up ' these networks for application development, leading to open standards such as the Parlay/OSA APIs. This thesis is primarily concerned with understanding the effectiveness of open standards for providing third party stakeholders with access to functions in Next Generation Networks. Effectiveness in this context is to do with how well open systems may, and can, enable the business aims, and consequent technological advantages to achieve the business aims. We reason about the effectiveness from three perspectives in terms of whether the open standard provides sufficient openness, functional coverage, and practicality. While the methodology and models are applicable to evaluating open standards in general, we specifically apply them to the QoS control functionality provided by the Parlay/OSA Connectivity Manager Service Capability Feature