An Extensible Architecture for Mobile Network Management Event Distribution and Rule Processing - A Performance Evaluation

The explosion in consumer devices has resulted in a significant increase in the number of mobile telecommunications nodes. As a result of increased device and node numbers, network operators have experienced a large increase in associated events. In such an environment, scalability and performance of event handling become important aspects for Operation Support Systems (OSS). A traditional approach has been to centralize monitoring and decision functions. The scale of events in a modern mobile telecommunications network means such centralized implementations are performance limited. What is required is a remodeling of Complex Event Processing (monitoring) and Policies (decision making) towards a distributed yet coordinated system. This paper describes an extensible architecture for such a distributed policy-based event processing system. Our approach provides a pluggable mechanism into which various event handling functionality can be integrated. In order to illustrate the applicability of our approach we evaluate the performance of 2 message queuing protocols, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) based RabbitMQ and Java Web Sockets. Our performance evaluation illustrates the ability of our architecture to transparently integrate alternative event processing technologies.