Wireless operators are constantly facing the challenge of improving the quality of wireless services. As many different services emerge, quantifying and assuring service quality becomes an increasingly complicated task for most operators. It is an ad hoc task with little coordination among operations managers. In a nutshell, today s service management is made up of isolated NMSs plus an IT management environment. Network management tasks consist of collecting a lot of performance data, generating weekly or monthly reports, and logging large numbers of events or alarms. Data is mostly generated by a number of disjointed EMSs, or in some cases, by individual NEs. In the service and application areas, traditional IT management platforms such as Hewlett-Packard s HP OpenView, Computer Associates Unicenter, or IBM s Tivoli are popular platforms for monitoring and logging server and corporate LAN status or alarm events. However, there is usually little correlation between the IT management platform and other EMSs. For each isolated domain, true service management lies in the hands of the personnel taking care of their particular domain (application, core network, radio network). Different domains are normally handled by different organizations, which are operated independently and, most likely, with little interaction. There are no integrated and correlated views of end-to-end service quality, and there are hardly any consistent efforts towards assuring service quality.

Most recently, driven by the desire to migrate to a service-centric management paradigm, many wireless operators are actively moving towards a model-based approach to service management. In this chapter, we focus on the...