� OverviewJohn Meyer and Alvin Barshefsky

Lucent Worldwide Services (LWS) helps compa-

nies maximize asset utilization, improve efficiencies,

and grow profit through network infrastructure im-

plementation and management. LWS represents the

most experienced network services organization in

the industry and, with more than 11,000 people and

almost $2B in annual revenue, it is one of the largest.

It provides a comprehensive suite of professional,

deployment, management, and maintenance network

services to the leading wireless and wireline telecom-

munications service providers, governments, cable

industries, and enterprises worldwide. As a leading

network integrator, LWS has a strong multi-vendor

value proposition giving clients a single point of con-

tact for all their network solutions. At LWS’s core are

the experience and knowledge of its people, the

power and reach of its technology, and the Bell Labs

innovations that enable the people of LWS to create

value for clients. This issue of the Bell Labs Technical

Journal provides a sampling of that Bell Labs-inspired

services technology.

The papers and letters in this issue are grouped

into three sets:

• Network design and deployment,

• Network optimization, and

• Error detection, prevention, and maintenance.

These groupings should not be viewed as exclu-

sive. Technologies described in network optimization

are also used during initial network design. Similarly,

data and knowledge capture described as part of error

detection, prevention, and maintenance are used dur-

ing both network design and optimization.

The network design and deployment set of entries be-

gins with “Design for Networks—The Ultimate Design

for X” by Maltzman, Rembis, Donisi, Farley, Sanchez,

and Ho. In this paper, the authors describe their total

network design approach from element design through

deployment, integration, and operations, using their

experience with optical networks as examples. Issues

of application integration in multi-vendor voice over

Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks are reviewed in the

letter by McMahon, Hofmann, and Hilt, “Opportunities

for VoIP Application Integration Services.” Deploying

new applications across such multi-vendor networks

presents unusual challenges, and the authors propose

methods for overcoming those challenges. Chief among

those methods is a variation on Web-based paradigms.

Many network services providers’ requirements

are driven by governmental regulation. In the let-

ter “Services to Support Regulatory Action and

Requirements,” Goldstein describes a range of

government-mandated requirements, along with the

approaches taken by LWS to assist those companies

impacted by the mandates to meet those require-

ments, as well as potential implications for emerging

network technologies. The ability to provide a rapid

deployment solution in a multi-vendor environment

is highlighted in Vanguri’s “Wireless Provisioning

Service Solution and Deployment—A Real-Life

Experience in Global Project Management.” This paper

uses specific examples of successful large-scale project

management techniques in complex, multi-vendor

deployments.

The network optimization selection of entries

focuses on advanced analysis techniques in a variety

of service applications and network domains. The

first is “Network Optimization Trials of a Vendor-

Independent Methodology Using the Ocelot® Tool”

by Drabeck, Flanagan, Srinivasan, MacDonald, Hampel,

and Diaz. This technology simultaneously optimizes

radio frequency (RF) coverage and capacity in a

wireless network. The trials described on operational

Bell Labs Technical Journal 9(4), 1–4 (2005) © 2005 Lucent Technologies Inc. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). • DOI: 10.1002/bltj.20056

Panel 1. Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Terms

3G—Third generation3G1X—CDMA2000* first evolution3G1xEV-DO—CDMA2000 evolution–data onlyATM—Asynchronous transfer modCDMA—Code division multiple accessLWS—Lucent Worldwide ServicesRF—Radio frequencySONET—Synchronous optical networkSS7—Signaling System 7UMTS—Universal Mobile Telecommunications

SystemUTRAN—UMTS terrestrial radio access

networkVoIP—Voice over Internet ProtocolXML—Extensible Markup LanguageXSLT—Extensible Stylesheet Language

Transformation

2 Bell Labs Technical Journal

wireless networks demonstrate significant increases

in capacity with corresponding decreases in dropped

and blocked calls. Optimization of connection-oriented

data networks is described in “iOptimize: A Software

Capability for Analyzing and Optimizing Connection-

Oriented Data Networks in Real Time” by Asghar,

Bhatia, Chandwani, Corcoran, Hao, Karwisch, Koppol,

Lakshman, Siesta, and Zlatos. This paper shows that

the analysis of traffic patterns and transport capabili-

ties helps in balancing dynamic routing performance

against connection re-routing to produce results that

improve network resource utilization. Nithi, Nuzman,

and Tang address the subject of maximizing the

capacity of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch

topologies in “Network Capacity Recovery and

Efficient Capacity Deployment in Switching Centers.”

MASCOT optimization technology was created specifi-

cally to solve this problem in ATM networks, but

it has since shown value for other devices such as

synchronous optical network (SONET) cross connects.

A particular need exists to have new services that

allow apportionment of more network resources for

high-speed third-generation (3G) data while maintain-

ing voice quality. “New Optimization and Management

Services for 3G Wireless Networks Using CELNET

Xplorer” by Buvaneswari, Ravishankar, Graybeal,

Haner, and Rittenhouse describes a new service based

on CELNET Xplorer, a non-intrusive tool designed

with advanced measurement, analysis, and optimiza-

tion capabilities for 3G1X, 3G1xEV-DO, and Universal

Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks.

UMTS 3G wireless networks also create unusual chal-

lenges in the way that network management data

is distributed, duplicated, and transformed across

the UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN)

sub-network of radio network controllers and base

stations. Meeting these challenges is addressed in

“Maintaining Data Consistency Across Distributed Ele-

ments Using XML/XSLT” by Leng, Hands, Mahapatra,

and Stuhlmacher. Serving as a bridge between this

collection of papers and the next is Brugman’s letter,

“Call-Routing Analysis Using SS7 Data.” Signaling

System 7 (SS7) data, which is transport-system and

switch-translation independent, implicitly spans

multi-vendor telecommunications networks. This data

is used for both network optimization and error de-

tection.

The entries describing error detection, prevention,

and network maintenance begin with Hartley’s letter,

“Defining Effective Service Level Agreements for

Network Operation and Maintenance.” The effective

application of any technology and expertise to main-

taining and improving a customer network starts with

a clear statement of and agreement to expectations.

Doing this well, as described in the letter, creates an

environment where the customer and vendor can

work much more powerfully together toward com-

mon goals. The capture and (re)use of LWS consult-

ants’ and support engineers’ intellectual property is

the focus of “The Experium™ Knowledge Resource

System—Brainpower as Competitive Advantage.”

Here, Byrnes, Bromfield, Taskent, and Doane describe

the technologies for collecting the knowledge capital

and solutions expertise of LWS and making accessible

the accumulated (and monotonically growing) col-

lection of knowledge capital and solutions. Since these

mechanisms are vendor independent, this data has

important impact for LWS’s ability to provide solu-

tions to customers’ business problems and to respond

quickly to customers’ network issues. In addition,

LWS can directly augment customers’ own operations

Bell Labs Technical Journal 3

by integration with their in-house support systems.

Combining LWS’s knowledge and experience with

specific data about a customer’s network produces

exceptional results.

The ability to capture network element data and

network topological data across the multi-vendor

universe is essential to supporting a broad array of

services. In “Rapid Software Development for Multi-

Vendor Services,” Bass, Erman, Mongeau, Wu, and

Xie describe the NetInventory technology and its

declarative command processor engine. This funda-

mental technology, which enables rapid response to

new services’ needs in the realms of auto-network

discovery and auto-network data retrieval, has been

employed successfully in a number of existing LWS

services and is now being broadly expanded in the

multi-vendor space.

Addressing a customer network issue before it

becomes an end-customer observable problem is a

long-standing goal of fault prediction and preventive

maintenance services. “Statistical Algorithms in Fault

Detection and Prediction: Toward a Healthier Network,”

the paper by Cheung, Kumar, and Rao, describes the

mathematical underpinning to predictive network

performance that leads to operational methods of

maximizing network performance while minimizing

overall maintenance costs. Both learning-based and

correlation-based algorithms are described. Several

applications of preventative maintenance concepts are

described in “Preventative Maintenance: A Proactive

Customer Service” by Barker, Lane, Holbrook,

Vadrevu, and Padalino. These applications include a

number of existing services technologies for Lucent

network elements in both the wireline and wireless

domains. The descriptions include the underlying

data acquisition, analysis, and display technologies,

as well as examples from actual customer usage.

We hope that this collection of papers and letters

conveys the technological breadth and depth on

which LWS is based. These Bell Labs innovations are

enabling a wide range of cost-effective services solu-

tions for LWS customers across the broad range of

multi-vendor networks and emerging communica-

tions technologies. The combination of broad, deep

knowledge and superior technology to extend the

reach of that knowledge underscores LWS’s position

as the vital partner and network integrator around

the globe.

*TrademarkCDMA2000 is a registered trademark of the Telecom-

munications Industry Association.

(Manuscript approved October 2004)

JOHN MEYER is president of Lucent Worldwide Services (LWS), one of the industry’s largest andmost knowledgeable groups of skillednetwork designers, technicians, consultants,engineers, and installers. In this position,he is responsible for driving Lucent

Technologies’ initiative for becoming the industryleader in providing the broadest portfolio ofdeployment and professional services support to theworld’s largest service providers. Prior to joiningLucent, he was a corporate officer with EDS, one of theworld’s leading outsourcing and technology consultingfirms, for nearly 20 years. As the president of EDS’sEMEA operations, he led the organization’s growthfrom $3.9B to $6.1B in annual revenue in 29 countries.Mr. Meyer holds a B.S. degree in management fromPennsylvania State University in University Park and anM.B.A. degree in quantitative methods from theUniversity of Missouri in Columbia. He representsLucent on the National Reliability InterconnectivityCouncil (NRIC) for the Federal CommunicationsCommission and is on the board of Advisors for theCollege of Information Sciences and Technology atPennsylvania State University.

ALVIN BARSHEFSKY is a technical manager in Lucent Worldwide Services (LWS) at LucentTechnologies’ Lisle, Illinois, location. Heholds a B.S. in physics from the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.S. inoperations research from Lehigh University

in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Over his career, he has leddevelopment teams in such diverse product areas asvoice store-and-forward systems, cellular systems, andintelligent networks for both North American andinternational customers. Outside Lucent, as chair of theMichigan State University Computer Science DepartmentBoard of Visitors, he led efforts to strengthenuniversity/industry collaborations. Mr. Barshefsky’s mostrecent work is in Web-enabled, large database,automatically delivered services that enable LWS clients

4 Bell Labs Technical Journal

to effectively maintain the operational performance oftheir networks and enhance inventory configurationefficiencies. This approach has created a new class ofservices in the LWS portfolio. In this arena, his teamshave won Bell Labs President’s Awards (both Silver andGold). For the innovation and accomplishmentdisplayed in the overall body of his accomplishments,publications, patents, and presentations, he wasrecognized in 2002 as a Bell Labs Fellow. �