TABLE OF CONTENTS To deal in a systematic, scalable, and reusable fashion with the service management issues described above, it is desirable to define a service management framework. In this section, we describe such a framework based on the concept of a service model, which is designed with the following criteria.
One of the major reasons for developing a service model is to use it to manage the increasing complexity of mobile services. Mobile service is becoming more complex because it is basically a superset of Internet services. Compared to circuit switched voice, mobile services have a much shorter history. Consequently, many characteristics and user requirements are not stable or understood. This is compounded by the fact that the life cycle of mobile data services is much shorter than providers are accustomed to. For mobile services, further complexity arises as a result of the mobility nature of the service. Issues related to handoff, roaming, and the capacity limitation of the RAN all add complexity to the management problem.
Due to the proliferation of mobile services and many different possible quality grades of services, it is impractical to reengineer a service management model each time a new service is created and offered. Providers must adopt a framework that can be reused with minor modifications when new services are offered. As we will describe in the following sections, reusability is possible since most services can be decomposed into a few fundamental...
