ZERO TOUCH INVENTORY (ZTI) AS PART OF OPERATION SUPPORT SYSTEM (OSS) IN FUTURE NETWORKS

Operation Support System (OSS) is a set of programs that help a communicatio ns service provider monitor, control, analyze, and manage problems with a telephone or data network. Inventory Management Systems such as Granite's Xng or Cramer's Dimension helping service provider s to keep track of their assets in their network, to improve their service delivery and last but not least to provision a new service for customers. Standard products in Inventory space require an implementation/modeling-phase of an existing network any where between 6 to 9 months. Also an accuracy of data i s not always guaranteed, since there is always a discrepancy between the modeling and the planning organization. In this invention the inventory module is not to be fed with data from existing network. It rather scans the network and poll the information out of the network. Once the information is gathered from the network, some smart algorithms needs to be run, in order to put the data together and get a meaningful inventory system. Since the data is always updated from network (network driven update vs. manually), the data stored is always accurate.