Multidomain IT architectures for next-generation communications service providers [Next-Generation Telco IT Architectures]

Enabling interdomain and end-to-end management are major challenges for IT architectures supporting agile next-generation communications service providers. This requires explicit management of the interdomain relationships themselves rather than treating extra-domain resources or services as equivalent to internal capabilities. In this article we describe a general layered model for describing interdomain relationships and a concrete architecture for a domain relationship manager based on a combination of model-driven development and semantic web technology. Our prototyping efforts are discussed, and both examples and descriptions aid gaining an understanding of the underlying technologies. Finally, a use case is presented to illustrate the application of these techniques and especially to show the dynamic behavior of a system based on this engineering approach.