Serialization of Telecom Provisioning Transactions in Distributed Systems

Abstract

Telecom provisioning transactions play a central role in the provisioning and termination as well as the alteration of communication services within the modern telecommunications networks. The transactions span a number of dispersed systems, including network management systems (NMS), business support systems (BSS), operations support systems (OSS), different network components, and external third-party platforms. The growth in the use of cloud-native software, network virtualization, and software-defined networking has significantly increased the complexity, scale, and frequency of provisioning operations. The paper is a systemic review of the transaction of telecom provisioning, its life cycle, the general operation conditions, and the major entities involved. It also looks at the issue of handling transactions in distributed telecom systems like dependency ordering and the conflicts of concurrency, race conditions and deadlocks. Different provisioning transaction models such as synchronous transactions, asynchronous transactions and long-running transactions are studied to reveal their appropriateness to the different operational needs. Moreover, the paper reviews and compares methods of serialization and concurrency control, such as pessimistic and optimistic control, lock-based, timestamp ordering, queue-based, and token-based models, and event-driven, message-based, serialization. The trade-offs between consistency, scalability, and performance are discussed and the necessity of sound transaction management structures to the realization of service reliability, proper billing, and high service-level agreements in next-generation telecom networks highlighted.