Provisioning Voice Over Packet Networks: A Metadata Driven, Service Object Based Approach

Voice over Packet (VoP) technology has made significant inroads into service providers’ infrastructure, leading to the convergence of voice and data networks. As voice functionality gets distributed across the network, VoP management systems need to address the challenges of coordinated provisioning across multiple devices. To be able to cope with the many flavors of VoP networks that exist and the multitude of different network elements that they consist of, it becomes a necessity for the provisioning system to be custom programmed. This paper presents a metadata driven approach, based on a concept of Service Objects, that allows a provisioning application to easily handle variations in network architecture, equipment types, and equipment versions. We describe our implementation experiences with a VoP management system that leverages our approach and its flexibility, utilizing XML definitions and Enterprise Java Beans as implementation technologies.