IRTMS |
3. Hardware independence and Open architecture
IRTMS has been designed to be a scalable open EMS, which can encompass new and old testing technologies and testing processes in a coherent and consistent manner. IRTMS uses ORACLE 10gR2 and has access to a wide variety of communication protocols utilising, a wide range of I/O hardware to connect to remote test equipment.
State of the art database technology and application design has produced a very high performance system with a highly scalable architecture with an enormous capacity capable of running thousands of complete circuits tests every minute.
The core of the system is based on a high performance real time software suite, which adds negligibly small latencies to the hardware test execution times. The time taken to dispatch a circuit test, recover the test results, perform any extra analysis and store all requests, resource allocations and test results is accomplished extremely efficiently with almost no overhead.
In addition, the system design is such that many different types of test equipment and circuit switch access equipment can be managed effectively and controlled very efficiently, to yield the highest possible test efficiency.
4. Results Post processing
Results generated by the test hardware can optionally be fed into a results post processing engine for a more detailed and comprehensive analysis. The analysis can incorporate previous benchmark results on a circuit by circuit or circuit type basis. This analysis sub-system can access related information, such as cable compositions, routing and sizes, from other disparate systems operated by the Telecommunications company. The interfaces are open and easily extensible. The result post processing can be tailored to suit individual Telco requirements and can be extended to be significant components of a fully automated test facility. [City Computing has considerable experience in producing large scale automated testing and diagnostics systems and has been doing so for over 10 years].
5. Northbound interfaces & SNMP
The IRTMS northbound interface can be either supplied as a CORBA compliant interface or can be provided as JMS 1.02b compliant. There is no reduction in system performance as a result of using the northbound interfaces and the full power of the test engine is made available to the northbound client systems. All types of circuit testing, batch and interactive testing are supported using the existing northbound interfaces.
The system is designed to self diagnose its hardware components according to a schedule setup by the system administrators. The self diagnostics sub-system can report problems detected with the system hardware and/or associated remote test hardware and exchange switches to a SNMP manager for problem rectification and alarm handling.
6. Future Road Map
IRTMS is well established as a major Private Circuit testing system handling multiple test points; it is also a feature rich voice testing system, which can manage many different types of exchange test equipment and test equipment types. IRTMS is currently being enhanced to support the latest technologically-advanced test heads such as the IPMAX from Spirent, to offer IP data level testing, VoIP and IPTV/MSTV testing and related QOS facilities. IRTMS is already a multiple test point test management system and can easily support complex circuit tests where different items of circuit test hardware can be used at different locations (test points) on a circuit to co-operatively diagnose circuit faults conditions.
City Computing is prepared to interface other types of test and measurement hardware and exchange circuit switches into IRTMS to satisfy specific customer requirements. City Computing is also prepared to interface IRTMS to any other Inventory Circuit database as may be operated by the telco.
7. Main business benefits
The major benefits of IRTMS is that the telecommunication company is not tied to a single test hardware or computer hardware manufacturer. IRTMS already supports different test equipment from manufactures such as Anritsu; Wiltron; Spirent; Hewlett Packard; GPT; Harris; FlukeNetworks, and circuit switch manufacturers such as AT&T, Siemens, Alcatel, Ericson, GPT etc.
The IRTMS EMS treats the different types of test and switch hardware in a consistent and uniform manner to extract the test instruments best performance.
IRTMS has been designed to be an open EMS, which can be readily adapted to control and manage other types of test and measurement equipment together with the associated circuit exchange/access equipment. [City Computing has over 24 years experience with many different types of interface technology encompassing both the very latest technologies and some old and obscure interface standards].
IRTMS is a cost effective solution enabling telcos to maintain the value of their investment in test hardware without having to obsolete their entire test system just because the original manufacturer no longer wishes to support the original testing OSS or because the original test equipment has become obsolete. With IRTMS new test hardware can be incorporated and managed in unison with older more traditional test hardware. This feature and because of IRTMS independence with respect to test equipment hardware manufacturers ensures that IRTMS is future proofed.
8. Operational Environment
IRTMS is available for use on Sun SPARC or AMD based hardware. Connectivity to the exchange and access control hardware is achieved using a number of different control mechanisms e.g. IP, Leased Line, Dial up Modem, X25 (X.3 PAD or Raw X.25) or Voice signalling control protocols (DTMF for example). We normally recommend that communication hardware is installed under Microsoft Server 2003 running in a Sun AMD machine or equivalent. [This gives an enormous range of different hardware connectivity options as most manufacturers provide good support under Microsoft operating systems]. The specialised analysis processing and database components are hosted under Solaris on Sun systems.
Circuit testing is available via JMS as a fully functional Northbound testing service, an Active Directory authenticated Web testing service and through the administrators GUI tool (the IRTMS Task Browser). IRTMS is fully administered using the Task Browser, installed onto Microsoft based systems. Circuit Testing is also supported via 3G Web access.
