IRTMS |
1. Introduction and History
IRTMS is a very sophisticated element management system (EMS) designed to efficiently manage many different types of remote telecommunications test equipment on a large scale. The earliest version of the “Integrated Remote Test Management System” (IRTMS) has been in continuous use since the 1990’s and is responsible for the testing of all T1, E1 & nx64 international private circuits operated by British Telecommunications. In addition, IRTMS has been extended to incorporate complex multiple test-point circuit testing functionality. More recently, IRTMS has been further developed to become a very capable and efficient voice testing system used to diagnose faulty telephone circuits, where testing speed, reliability and accuracy are of the greatest importance.
City Computing work with a number of manufacturers (notably including Anritsu-Wiltron, Hewlett Packard, Harris, FlukeNetworks and Spirent) to make IRTMS an integrated and consistent EMS for diverse remote test units. However, City Computing remain manufacturer-neutral allowing IRTMS customers to incorporate the best available Remote Test Units (RTUs) for the purpose at hand. IRTMS is currently deployed to support testing in the following domains:
- IRTMS for International Private Circuits (Analogue & Digital)
- IRTMS for Analogue Private Circuits.
- IRTMS for Switched Voice Circuits.
- IRTMS for Broadband and NGN services (current in progress roadmap).
IRTMS is used to maintain in excess of 10 million circuits. The IRTMS EMS is capable of handling more than 50 completed test request/results per second. More than 10,000 Remote Test Units can be supported by IRTMS.
Figure 1: IRTMS Generalised layout
2. Objective of IRTMS
The objective of IRTMS was to construct an open, extensible, scalable and highly efficient EMS for test and measurement hardware with the following main attributes:
- Fully manage all test access and test measurement hardware.
- Provide administrators helpful system diagnostics enabling problems with the test equipment to be identified and resolved as quickly as possible.
- Perform circuit tests as quickly as possible and deliver the test results to the users as fast as possible.
- Provide the user with the best diagnostics results possible.
- Record all configuration changes.
- Record all test results in Oracle database tables.
- Provide a highly efficient and fast lightweight client (Web) based testing for circuit testers in addition to a fully featured North Bound circuit test interface.
- Provide a comprehensive administrators user interface to gain full control of the power of the IRTMS EMS.
- Provide full control of the features offered by the user interface to its users through the customisation and allocation of Roles and Privileges to individual users or groups of users.
- Adoption of open interfaces wherever possible to make the task of adding support for new instrument types / exchange hardware as straight-forward as possible.
- To help our customers preserve the considerable investment they have made in their existing test & measurement infrastructure and to provide a way to migrate forward using alternative test & measurement hardware.
- IRTMS EMS guarantees uniformity of presentation and reduces the need for costly training on multiple EMS from many manufacturers.
- Reduced support costs – one EMS – one support costs package.
- The decision to incorporate a new piece of test equipment can be based entirely on the capabilities of the test equipment selected without being encumbered by unsuitable EMS systems.
