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INVITED PAPER Special Issue on the Past, Present, and Future of Communications Technologies in the IEICE

Management of Information, Communications, and Networking:from the Past to the Future

Shingo ATA†a) and Toshio TONOUCHI††, Members

SUMMARY As a result of large-scale and complicated of ICT (Infor-mation and Communication Technology), the technologies of operationsand management of ICT infrastructure and systems are changing to adoptthe variation and diversity of usage and communication characteristics.In retrospect, operations and management technologies cover widely fromthe support of telecommunications operations and remote monitoring formaintaining network equipments, to an integrated network managementframework for configuration, monitoring, testing and controls. Recently,the spread of network virtualization technologies enable agility, integrity,and resilience to ICT services. Operations and management technologieswill be more important in future, for the support of integrated manage-ment of ICT infrastructure including computing resource, and automationof service operations. In this paper, we review research activities of theTechnical Committee on Information and Communications Management(ICM) with discussions of individual research category. We then describethe state-of-the-art topics and future directions in the area of ICM.key words: information and communications management, network oper-ation, telecommunication, operation systems, business process

1. Introduction

This paper looks back research activities in the area of op-erations and management, by reviewing the history of theTechnical Committee on Information and CommunicationsManagement (ICM). We also describe the state-of-the-artresearch from the topics presented in recent meetings. Wethen discuss the direction towards the future ICT operationsand management.

1.1 A Brief Introduction of ICM

ICM [1] is one of technical committees in IEICE Commu-nications Society, organized since 1997, the name of whichwas Telecommunications Management (TM) at the begin-ning. The mission of ICM is to promote the evolution ofresearch and development on information and communica-tions management, which covers operations, administration,maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) of not only net-working and information systems but also services and ap-plications deployed above. The interest in ICM becomeshigher by following the evolution of information systems

Manuscript received November 2, 2016.Manuscript revised February 6, 2017.Manuscript publicized March 22, 2017.†The author is with the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka

City University, Osaka-shi, 558-8585 Japan.††The author is with the System Platform Research Laboratories,

NEC Corporation, Kawasaki-shi, 211-8666 Japan.a) E-mail: ata@info.eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp

DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2016PFI0017

and computer networking, characterized by down-sizing anddecenterization. The importance of information and com-munications management spreads broadly to general privatecompanies as well as telecommunications carriers, due to thetransition of the role of operations management in businessprocesses by using ICT (Information and CommunicationTechnology). Following the growth of networking technolo-gies such as LAN (Local Area Network), WAN (Wide AreaNetwork), and the Internet, the integrated and/or efficientoperations and management of information system, network,and business process become important. Such trend is re-cently accelerated by the spread of broadband IP networkand multimedia services.

The aim of ICM is to promote communication amongresearchers from various fields and exchange activities forfurther enhancement of ICM researches. The TechnicalCommittee on Telecommunications Management (formername of ICM) was established in 1997, after the successfulconclusion of Network Operations and System ManagementCommittee (NOSC). As a background, there was a globalmomentum toward scholar and systematic study on networkmanagement, especially in respect to clarify, define, and stan-dardize the concept, management architecture, managementfunctionalities, and interfaces (e.g., protocols). For exam-ple, CCITT (Comite Consultatif International Telegraphiqueet Telephonique), currently called as ITU-T (InternationalTelecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardiza-tion Sector), had started to discuss TMN (Telecommunica-tions Management Network) in 1985, IEEE NOMS (NetworkOperations and Management Symposium) was started since1998, and an industrial consortium for network management(Network Management Forum, currently TMF (TeleMan-agement Forum)) had been established in 1988. At thattime, the breakup of AT&T and the privatization of NTTdrive the trend to diversification of telecommunications car-riers, i.e., multi-service providers and multi-vendor, whichleads to recognize the necessity of systematization of net-work management to address the interoperability issues.

Conventionally, the operations and management wasmainly targeted for telecommunications carriers, but theimportance of OAM&P is being disseminated broadly toapplication service providers, enterprises, datacenters, andcloud services, to integrate various types of distributed re-sources such as networking, computing, storages, etc., forvalue-added user-centric services. Following the fact thatthe target of OAM&P transits to the ICT infrastructure asa whole, instead of telecommunications carrier’s network,

Copyright © 2017 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

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the name of Technical Committee has been changed to ICMin 2008 to enhance an encouragement of participation fromuniversities.

1.2 Organization

The organization of ICM is something unique comparedto other technical committees. Especially, many commit-tee members belong to BUs (Business Units) of carrier andvendor companies, as well as R&D (Research and Develop-ment) section from industry. The ratio of participants fromacademia was initially small, but since 2000s the ratio isincreasing as the progress of Internet researches. Currently,participants in ICM are well balanced from carrier and ven-dor companies (both R&D and BU), operators and serviceproviders, and universities.

Annually, ICM has five regular meetings (typically onMay, July, November, January, March) and one workshop.Regular meetings have a number of presentations on topicsbroadly related to ICM, including some invited talks andlectures, and workshop is aimed to discuss a special topictowards management-related issues in future. In two annualIEICE conferences, usually ICM sponsors special sessionsrelated network and service management, and English ses-sion to provide an opportunity for international students topresent their research.

ICM has strong relationships to international commit-tees. KNOM (The committee on Korean Network Opera-tions and Management) in KICS (Korean Information andCommunications Society) and ICM host a co-sponsored an-nual international symposium, Asia-Pacific Network Op-erations and Management (APNOMS). ICM also interactsclosely with IEEE Communications Society Technical Com-mittee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM).

1.3 Research Fields

Table 1 shows the current list of research fields and topicscovered by ICM. The table consists of two layers, i.e., fivebroad research area having individual topics respectively.

The active research topics presented in NOSC/TM/ICMvary widely with the times. The topics actively discussedwere fundamental objective and role of network manage-ment, architecture or platform (e.g., TMN), and its inter-faces, including managed object-oriented architecture likeCORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).The topics were shifted to service management, IP man-agement (including policy management and QoS controls),and SLA (Service Level Agreement), according to the spreadof IP networks. Recently, new trends and services such ascloud and SDN (Software Defined Networking)/NFV (Net-work Function Virtualization), integrated service manage-ment such as orchestration in addition to individual manage-ment techniques become more attractive.

We can also see a transition of hot topics from titles ofannual workshops, topics in IEICE conferences, and themesof APNOMS series. Table 2 summarizes themes in AP-

Table 1 Research area and topics covered by ICM.

Table 2 Themes in APNOMS.

NOMS for example. In the end of 1990s, telecommuni-cation management was a main topic, and around 2000s,there was a paradigm shift from operator-centric manage-ment to service-centric management, to provide various anduser oriented services. At the same time, since various com-munication services had been shifted to IP-based network,service management with integration of voice, video, anddata communications in IP network became a hot topic. Asa progress of NGN (Next Generation Network), around midof 2000s, ubiquitous communication and network conver-gence were key topics. Recently, cloud management, bigdata and IoT management, and virtualization/softwarizationtechnologies become hot topics.

Following above background, we next survey individualresearch topic actively discussed in ICM meetings. Figure 1briefly summarizes active topics by time in both TM andICM meetings. In Sect. 2, we introduce active topics duringa period of TM (until 2008). Then we describe topics inICM (since 2008) in Sect. 3, and discuss on current issues inSect. 4. Finally we conclude this paper in Sect. 5.

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Fig. 1 Brief summary of active topics in TM/ICM meetings.

2. Research Topics in TM

2.1 Carrier Operations

As the progress of B-ISDN (Broadband Integrated ServicesDigital Network), research and development on integratedservice system in telecommunication carrier was very active,where the main topic of discussion was related to service op-eration, i.e., how to provide customized service in carrier op-erated network. In NOSC meeting, challenges and solutionsfor customer services by IT was actively discussed [2].

At that time, the community was much interested in howto integrate the management of telecommunication systems.Since 1980s, the advancement of communication systems re-sulted the development of centralized operation and manage-ment systems with sophisticated functionalities. These sys-tems owned original architecture individually developed, andprovided diverse interfaces for management [3]. Such trend,that different communication systems have different archi-tectures and interfaces, brought telecommunications carriersto develop a new, complicated, and expensive managementsystem for interconnected communication systems. Gener-alization and standardization of management architecture,functionalities, and interfaces were highly demanded [4].To address this issue, TMN was defined and standardizedin ITU-T as a framework to provide an integrated, global,and cost effective management in multi-vender and multi-provider environment [5]. TMN consists of five catego-rized functionalities, which is well known as FCAPS (FaultManagement, Configuration Management, Account Man-

agement, Performance Management, and Security Manage-ment). The functional model is defined by object orientedparadigm, and described by UML (Unified Modeling Lan-guage) [6]. Around mid- and late-1990s, many papers fo-cused on TMN-related topics, including functional design,service implementation, and deployment, as well as its un-derlying technologies such as distributed object componentmodel (e.g., CORBA), object-oriented communication pro-tocol [7].

2.2 Operation System

TMN also defines four layered structure of Operations Sup-port System (OSS) architecture, i.e., Business ManagementLayer, Service Management Layer, Network ManagementLayer, and Element Management Layer. NMS (NetworkManagement System) is system of Service ManagementLayer of TMN, which consists of a platform, functionalcomponents, and applications, for monitoring and manage-ment of network and computation resources such as NEs(Network Elements) (e.g., routers, switches, firewalls), andservers (e.g., Web/DB servers). Especially, as the spreadof network, the number of NEs is increasing, which leadsa scalability issue to manage the huge number of NEs. Adistributed management framework was actively discussedto address the scalability. As the underlying technologies,distributed object oriented frameworks and their interfacedefinition (Distributed Java, CORBA IDL, Jini) were wellstudied. Advancing such technologies were inherited to SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) and SDP (Service DeliveryPlatform).

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Enlarge the scale and increase the complexity of net-work also required much complex OSS with higher in-telligence. Until 2000, OpS (Operation System) such asOSS/BSS was developed and deployed as individual sys-tem, however, around early 2000s, a demand for integrationof multiple Operation Systems was arisen in multi-vendor,multi-carrier, and multi-layer environment. Cooperative op-eration of multiple OSSes and BSSes was much focused, andaround mid-2000s, therefore TMF led a discussion to defineNGOSS (New Generation Operations Systems and Software)framework. NGOSS is a component-based framework todevelop a management system by composition of commer-cial components (called COTS; Commercial Off The Self).NGOSS consists of four major frameworks called eTOM(enhanced Telecom Operation Model), SID (Shared Infor-mation/Data Model), TAM (Telecom Application Map), andTNA (Technology Neutral Architecture) [8].

2.3 Service and Customer Oriented Management

Spanning network scale and diversity of application led net-work management more difficult and complex. A unifiedmanagement and control based on a single policy was be-coming difficult to satisfy the service quality of individualsubscribers. From these results, more customer-centric ap-proaches, called CSM (Customer Service Management) andCNM (Customer Network Management) were discussed [9].In these approaches, a customized SLA (Service LevelAgreement) and SLS (Service Level Specification) are pro-vided according to subscribers’ needs, and a dynamic servicecomposition is conducted.

2.4 Access Network Management

In early 2000s, FTTH (Fiber To The Home) service waslaunched by several service providers (NTT East/West,USEN, etc.). As the increase of the number of subscribers,reports on FTTH-related topics were increased, for example,OSS for achieving rapid operation on optical services, opti-cal network provisioning, optical path management, opticalfiber selection, optical-based traffic engineering with MPLS(Multi-Protocol Label Switching), operations and manage-ment of regional network, and optical wiring strategies werediscussed [10], [11].

For wide-area access network management, until 1998,management for ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), SDH(Synchronous Digital Hierarchy), or SONET (SynchronousOptical Networking) was major issue, however, the trend wasshifted to IP networking and wide-area Ethernet.

2.5 IP Operation and Management

From late-1990s, the evolution of IP network made a dras-tic change of telecom operations and management as well,where many carrier companies had shifted their strategyon telecom infrastructure to replace with IP-based network.Service integration over IP network was one of major topics

in TM meetings around 2000s. Unlike conventional car-rier networks, the philosophy of the Internet (such as KISSprinciple and best effort) derived many challenges to satisfythe requirement of carrier services. A typical example canbe found in SLA (Service Level Agreement), where SLAdefinition was shifted from operator-centric to customer- orservice-centric around 2004, to address wide variety of ap-plications and their requirements [12].

Research on VoIP (Voice over IP) was one of well-known topics in 2000s, to satisfy the users’ QoE (Qualityof Experience) over best-effort based IP network. Thereare many researches on traffic control to achieve voice qual-ity, authentication and accounting, and definition of servicefunctional component on a management framework. Thesetrends were extended to video delivery such as video tele-conferencing or live streaming.

IP network is completely different from legacy man-aged network, where NEs are working individually and au-tonomously, therefore, it is difficult to trace the actual causeof failures. Network monitoring, measurement, and/or traf-fic analysis became important to catch up the behavior ofnetworking system. From mid-2000s, researches on traf-fic measurement were highly attracted, including end-to-endperformance measurement (throughput, bandwidth, delay,. . . ), analysis of flow statistics, application identification anddetections of a factor which causes a performance degrada-tion. From 2008, IP network monitoring was then extendedto visualization of networking behavior, application and ser-vice layer monitoring, and auditing.

Following this trend, main target on OAM has beenvaried from ATM (until 1998) to Ethernet (around 2006),and active topics were regarding remote maintenance anddetection of failures and breakdowns.

Development on fundamental technologies in IP net-working were also involved. For example, techniques forperformance improvement of TCP (Transmission ControlProtocol), improvement of switching performance in NEs,optimization of contents delivery (e.g., web caching, CDN),QoS control in IP networks, management of multicasting,traffic control for multimedia applications, and multi-pathcontrols were presented.

The fact that the evolution of IP networks significantlychange activities of TM, for example, the number of paperswas much increased to address issues on IP networks, whichalso led the number of participants from universities.

2.6 Mobility Management

According to the standardization of IMT-2000, in early-2000s, mobility management was discussed. Compared towired network, performance of mobile network is quite sen-sitive against environment changes. There were a number ofstudies on the management and control for stable communi-cation (including hand over issues), adaptive change of datatransmission mode, and fault tolerant. Especially, manage-ment of mobility control through a cross-layer perspectiveon the mobility protocols may provide a seamless services

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to mobile users [13].

2.7 User Interface

The rapid growth of WWW (World Wide Web) changeda style of application, where many applications had beenshifted to Web-based. There are a couple of reasons that(1) HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) significantly im-proves the flexibility of composition of graphical user inter-face compared to legacy applications, (2) application logiccan be placed behind the web server which leads client ter-minals to be used as thin clients, and (3) ideally web basedapplications provide a unified interface regardless of oper-ating systems. Like other applications, many managementsystems have changed to web-based applications, while somehave changed to Java applet based. Such changes were muchaccelerated by the integration of service interfaces and Webservices, which was occurred in 2002. Many frameworkswhich used distributed component model (e.g., CORBA)to define interfaces had changed to use web-based APIs(Web services [14], currently a REST (REpresentationalState Transfer) based), to isolate user interface and logical(internal control) parts.

2.8 Operation Process Management

As the increase of the number of services and the scale ofOSS, process of operations becomes much complicated anddiverse. Operators are required to design a detailed processof operations (typically called as workflow) by selecting andconnecting component functions. The main issues include(1) how to optimize a composed workflow for efficient andrapid operation of business process, (2) how to verify thecorrectness of workflow, and (3) how to achieve a rapid de-sign of workflow. Based on the above interests, researches onworkflow control, optimization of work process by consider-ing efficiency, analysis of business process for optimizationor parallelization, re-ordering of service operations, and par-tition and re-construction of business order (called BusinessProcess Reenginnering) were studied.

The optimization of operation process brought anotherissue on service automation. To reduce the burden and re-sponsibility of operators, a whole or portion of operationprocess is preferred to run automatically without manual ac-tion by operators. There are some approaches for service op-eration. One typical way is to design a template of operationprocess (called scenario) then compose the actual operationprocess by configuring environment dependent parameters.To design a effective template, modeling and abstraction ofbusiness process is important. For example, ontology basedservice operation modeling was proposed in [15]. Alter-natively, the system first collects the history of operationalactions taken by operators, then reuse a portion of the his-tory (like snippets) if an operation is similar to previousones. The technical challenge on this approach is how todistinguish a generalized operations set from environmentdependent operations.

2.9 Crisis and Disaster Management

As stated in Sect. 1, the former committee of TM (NOSC)started in 1995, when Japan had experienced the GreatHanshin-Awaji Earthquake on January. The telecommu-nication infrastructure in Kobe city was seriously damagedwhich led difficulty on information sharing and communi-cations in the disaster area. The second meeting of NOSC,held on November, mainly focused on crisis management ofnetwork systems which includes disaster management andrecovery, fault torelance, high availability, and emergencypreparedness and management in telecom operations. Atthat time, the main focus was from perspectives of networkoperators and carriers, but the crisis management was muchfocused again widely after The Great East Japan Earthquakein 2011 [16].

2.10 Management of Next Generation Network

Since the mid-2000s, due to the introduction of Next Genera-tion Networks (NGNs), operation and management of NGNframework became much important. NGN realizes FMC(Fixed Mobile Convergence) to seamlessly integrate bothfixed (wired) and mobile (wireless) networks, and providesmultimedia applications which converge audio and videos,data communication, streaming and broadcasting like IPTV(called Triple Play). Especially in Japan, NGN was commer-cially launched in 2008 by NTT. Compared to the Internet,though both networks use IP as an underlying protocol, muchattention is paid in terms of QoS (Quality of Service), secu-rity, and management. Also, NGN is considered as a serviceframework to provide more flexible services following vari-ous types of user demands. Management is a key to enhancethe quality and satisfaction to value-added services.

From these background, topics on NGN were activelydiscussed not only in TM meetings but also workshops andconferences. APNOMS selected NGN related themes fortwo years [17], [18]. Many NGN related topics were pre-sented and discussed. Through the discussions on the DEP(Distinguished Experts Panel) in APNOMS 2008, panelistsemphasized that the most important thing in challenges forNGN operations and service management is the paradigmshift from the network-centric to the customer-centric views.The detailed discussions can be found in [18].

2.11 Management of Home Network

The spread of broadband network, including ADSL (Asym-metric Digital Subscriber Line) and FTTH (Fiber To TheHome), increases the importance of management of homenetworks. Home network is expected as a key for smart homeand smart city, which converges facilities in home where notonly computer terminals but also consumer electronics andsensors are connected via wired or wireless networks. Thedifficulty behind the home network management is that NEs

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such as home gateways, modems, routers, and ONUs (Op-tical Network Units) are placed at physically unmanageablearea (i.e., in individual subscriber’s home). It is quite diffi-cult to replace or upgrade NEs by subscriber, therefore, NEsare required to work with long-term support. Also, securityshould be paid much attention, because there is a risk thatthe home would be hijacked due to attacks to vulnerabilitiesof home NEs. Based on above requirements, there werepapers on remote maintenance and management of homegateways, including updating their firmwares and applyingpatches to security vulnerabilities. Also, security issues onhome networks were discussed.

3. Research Topics in ICM

Unlike the era of TM, activities of ICM are much focusedon IP-based networks while the ratio of telecommunicationsmanagement such as TMN and FCAPS is decreased. Be-low we show individual topics actively discussed in ICMmeetings.

3.1 Traffic Engineering and Topology Management

The control of traffic achieving satisfactory QoS requiresan adaptive, dynamic, and resilient design of network withsufficient resource assignment. Traffic engineering is oneof important roles in telecommunications network to opti-mize the performance in operational network. As the recentdevelopment of optical networks, researches on traffic en-gineering with GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol LabelSwitching) were raised. In ICM, topics especially discussedwere path control and management especially to improvethe redundancy as well as path protection mechanism, andmanagement of Layer-1 VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Many researches related to topology management werepresented in mid- and late-2000s. In addition to optical pathmanagement, overlay networking (including P2P) and wide-area VPN service were the factors to increase the intereston topology management. Typical topology managementconsists of following three steps, (1) determine the objec-tive function to be optimized, (2) define restrictions due tophysical network resources and traffic demand based on themeasurement or prediction, and (3) obtain the answer bysolving a kind of optimization problem.

3.2 Measurement, Detection, and Monitoring

Network measurement broadly covers traffic measurement,performance prediction, detection of networking events, andmonitoring NEs, which is a fundamental technology widelyapplicable to e.g., network provisioning, security manage-ment, QoS/QoE aware traffic control, and/or network main-tenance. Topics discussed in this area were topology estima-tion (physical or logical), throughput and delay prediction,bandwidth measurement, SNMP (Simple Network Manage-ment Protocol), and measurement framework.

The importance of visualization of network and sys-tem is increasing due to the increase of network size andthe number of facilities. It is hard for operators to iden-tify the behavior of the system and security risks [19] bychecking raw log data, because the volume of log data isquite huge which makes operators hard to identify an seriousevent from the records. Studies on visualization techniqueswere presented, for example, visualization with colored and3D graphs, smooth operation of scaling up/down, and ani-mated objects. Also, filtering unnecessary records, givingseverity or priority to emphasize critical events, were muchattracted for reducing operators’ workload.

For individual techniques, following topics were pre-sented in ICM meetings: detection of network/link/systemfailures, collaboration with security appliances, IDS (In-truder Detection System), detection of anomalies and vul-nerabilities, detection of mis-configuration of routing, andintegrated monitoring framework of ICT infrastructure. Ad-ditionally, collaboration with policy management and controlframework was attracted.

3.3 Cloud Management

Since mid- and late-2000s, technologies on cloud comput-ing became spread out, and many cloud services startedcommercially around early 2010s. Management of cloudand its services had been paid much attention [20]. Re-searches presented in ICM meetings were widely spread,especially, SaaS/PaaS/NaaS (Service/Platform/Network as aService) management, performance measurement, manage-ment of service integration, a unified framework to manageservice using multiple cloud operators, provisioning of datacenter, and management framework to provide on-demandservices.

Despite a rapid growth of cloud service, the marketof cloud services is shifting towards the oligopolization ofmajor providers [21]. At the same time, in recent trend oncloud first policy increased the demand for private cloudenvironment to achieve both improvement of availabilityand reliability and reduction of CPEX (Capital Expenditure)and OPEX (Operation Expense). Accordingly, open cloudecosystem spread rapidly which provides IaaS (Infrastruc-ture as a Service) by utilizing OSS (Open Source Software)such as OpenStack.

In the management of cloud services, a principle ofDevOps is important. DevOps is a word by a combinationof development and operation, where both development andoperation cooperate to establish a best practice to bridge agap existed between developers and operators [22]. DevOpsachieves to provide customer-centric services (including de-ployment of new features) more rapidly by satisfying a stableoperation. DevOps consists of a number of key technologies,i.e., automated infrastructure, validation and testing frame-work, performance monitoring, etc.

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3.4 Home Network Management

Home networks are expanding from a network to connectfacilities in home to an ICT infrastructure to be expectedvarious capabilities to e.g., enhancement of home security,collaborative actuations among consumer electronics, andhome automation. NTT had addressed “Home ICT” con-cept in its mid-term strategy, which is an ICT platform inhome area to support safe, secure, and comfortable humanlife through service creation [23]. From 2009, NTT and in-dustrial companies established the partnership agreement tostart demonstration experiment on home ICT services overNTT’s home ICT platform. Realization of home ICT hasmany technical challenges. Home gateway (HGW) is re-quired much capability to flexibly and remotely maintaincommunication protocols for specified services. For thispurpose, OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) frame-work is adopted in HGW to enable to install software ofthird party services flexibly [24]. Furthermore, standardiza-tion of communication protocols and APIs among HGW andconsumer appliances is important. In ICM meetings, paperson customer services over home ICT, management of homearea network, security of HGW including access controls,collaboration with cloud environment, and identification ofhome appliance from protocol exchanges were presented.

3.5 EMS (Element Management System)

Due to the significant increase of the number of NEs, theimportance of EMS was still high, but the key area wasslightly different. Much attention was paid in the area ofmulti-vendor EMS, flexible plugin configuration (as men-tioned above), and support for legacy NEs such as versioncontrol and update of firmwares [25].

3.6 Green Management

Around 2010s, energy consumptions of ICT infrastructurebecame a big issue, it was a world-wide challenging to makeICT infrastructure energy-efficient for sustainable growth ofICT [26]. In ICM meetings there were also discussionson energy-aware networking technologies. To address theglobal requirement for the reduction of carbon footprint inICT infrastructure, optimizing a power control of network-ing equipments is insufficient which simply results a localoptimization, i.e., a management of power saving with globalcoordination of ICT elements is highly required for a globaloptimization. From this background, topics on environmen-tal measure in ICT were discussed in the meetings, whichinclude power management in data center, energy aware traf-fic engineering, power management of access points in wire-less networks, and BEMS (Building Energy ManagementSystem)/HEMS (Home Energy Management System).

4. Toward Future Operations and Management

In this section we focus on research topics currently active

in ICM community and their discuss future directions. Wepick up four issues from the record of ICM meetings [27].

4.1 Big Data Management

Nowadays, Big Data is a major buzzword in ICT environ-ment. According to significant increase of volume of con-tents (in terms of both number and size), as well as varietyand velocity of data, it is easily expected that the resourceof ICT is difficult to follow the significant growth of con-tents, therefore management and control of ICT infrastruc-ture by optimizing the performance [28] becomes impor-tant. In addition, the trend of IoT (Internet of Things) andM2M (Machine-to-Machine) will make further accelerationof content and device explosion.

In the operations and management point of view, a com-bined big data and management has two directions, first,management of ICT is required to deliver of contents and/orservices, by optimizing various metrics on networking. Forexample, optimization of content placement by using con-tent caching improves not only end users’ QoE (e.g., overalllatency and throughput), but also efficiency on the use of ICTresources (e.g., bandwidth, storage, and processing power).However, diversified contents lead operators difficult to opti-mize content placement by a straightforward approach (e.g.,LRU (Least Recently Used) algorithm or Zipf’s low). Moreproactive approach such as prediction-based, considering re-lation of contents or movement of devices, clustering usersby social relations, would be possible solutions.

The second direction is that operations and managementalso requires a processing of big data, i.e., currently oper-ators are required to manage a huge number of networkingelements and servers, log data generated by such devices isalso a big data by itself. When an incident occurs, operatorshave to identify the cause by checking massive and complexlog data collected from various devices, in which collectedlogs are mixed both structured (e.g., represented by XML)and unstructured (e.g., syslog) data. Picking up meaningfuldata by data mining techniques is necessary to identify theevent [29]. Also, it is necessary to check the correlationsamong different logs (i.e., one incident may be recorded indifferent logs with different descriptions), to increase theaccuracy of the identification. In ICM meetings, there arepapers on filtering and reformatting log data to be reused fordata mining, construction of distributed data store for col-lecting large scale log data, and mining similar patterns fromdifferent logs.

Furthermore, data mining techniques are also appliedto operation and business processes, in order to analyze andextract sub processes from operational history. Techniquesof text analysis for both unstructured and structured data areused for classification and extraction of sub processes whichcan be reused for similar operations.

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4.2 Management in Virtualization and Softwarization En-vironment

Virtualization and softwarization are becoming much attrac-tive in recent years. So far, virtualization was a techniqueto emulate physical machines and networking hardware bysoftware programs. At that time, the main topic on virtual-ization was to manage virtual machines and switches (e.g.,running up/shutting down machines). However, networkvirtualization (since 2007) [30] and SDN [31] drasticallychange the paradigm of operations and management. SDNand OpenFlow isolate control and data planes, and the con-trol plane may be operated and managed by a centralizedmanner. Such nature significantly impacts to the style of op-erations and management of IP-based network. The conceptof SDN orchestration seems to have a similar philosophywith telecommunication management architecture, so thatthe introduction of SDN would lead a good interaction totelecommunications infrastructure. Also, programmabilityand flexibility of SDN greatly support for agile customer-centric service composition. Manageable SDN infrastruc-ture with flexible service chaining by NFV has a strong po-tential to realize dynamic and flexible optimization of ICTinfrastructure, and to provide customized service on demandto customer needs. Furthermore, abstraction of networkingfunctions significantly improve the interoperability of NEsin multi-vendor and multi-carrier environment [32].

In past three years, researches on SDN/NFV, and acooperation with cloud environment becomes significantlyincreased. Many topics related to virtualization and soft-warization are presented with great interest. The featuredtopics include automation service creation by customer’s re-quest, collaborative control with security appliances (e.g.,IDS, malware detection), an OSS/BSS framework in coop-eration with cloud services, on demand service chaining toenhance security based on customer’s needs. Additionally,programmability of SDN orchestration enables to configureservice infrastructure according to OpS workflow.

4.3 Advancing Automation of Management

In near future, automation of operations and managementwould be popular, to reduce the workload of operators. Re-cently, there is a problem that, due to the increase of complex-ity and sophisticated network security, operational engineersare required to have deeper technical skill with the knowledgein wide area (from routing and switching to cloud serviceand security). The current situation is something risky inrespect to reliability and security, because the number of op-erational engineers having enough skill is insufficient againstthe global demand. Since many of operations are repetitiveand routine tasks, the load of operational engineers can bereduced by automating these operations [33].

For the automated operations and management, thereare technical challenges on analysis of operation processes(including service extraction) to identify the possibility of

automation, identification of frequent operations from thehistory, framework for librarization of operations to be auto-mated and reused. Such technical issues are closely relatedto big data analysis of large scale logs. Also, test and verifica-tion of operation process are necessary to achieve reliability,but these processes can also be automated.

4.4 Standardization on Operations and Management

In the large scale environment, the manageability and in-teroperability of the infrastructure are more important. Inthis respect, standarization is another important issue. TMForum (TMF) currently working on the definition of frame-work called Frameworx, which is considered as a next gen-eration framework of NGOSS. TM Forum also promotesZOOM (Zero-time Orchestration, Operations and Manage-ment) project to discuss the direction of operations and man-agement in virtualization and cloud aware environment, incooperation with ONF (Open Networking Foundation) andETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute).Through experimental verifications, the achievements willbe included in future Frameworx revisions [34].

5. Conclusion

In this paper we have reviewed history and active researchtopics in the area of network operations and management,from the activities of the Technical Committee on Informa-tion and Communications Management. In future, manage-ment of ICT infrastructure would become more and moreimportant for providing flexible and user-centric serviceswith high security, reliability, and availability. To managecomplex and large scale infrastructure, a combination of au-tomation powered by the programmability and intelligenceof operational engineers would be a key. We hope serviceproviders, software engineers, and networking researchers,as well as telecom operators, to join our community anddiscuss together for making future ICM paradigms.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Mr. Masayoshi Ejiri for his helpfulintroduction of TM history.

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Shingo Ata received M.E. and Ph.D. de-grees in Informatics and Mathematical Sciencefrom Osaka University in 1998 and 2000, respec-tively. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Lecturer ofGraduate School of Enginnering at Osaka CityUniversity, and was an Associate Professor from2006 to 2013. Currently he is a Professor ofGraduate School of Engineering at Osaka CityUniversity. He is also the Director of Center forInformation Initiative at Osaka City Universitysince 2015. In 2013 and 2014, he was the Chair

of IEICE Technical Committee on Information and Communications Man-agement. His research works include networking architecture, design ofcommunication protocols, and performance modeling on communicationnetworks. He is a member of IEEE.

Toshio Tonouchi received a master degreein Department of Information Science, Facultyof Science, University of Tokyo in 1992. Hehas worked in NEC Corporation since 1992. Heworked for management platforms and develop-ment process and tools of the platforms. He wasa visitor of Department of Computing, Impe-rial College, UK in 2000–2001, and he receivedhis PhD from Osaka University. He won a Ya-mashita memorial award from IPSJ in 2003 anda TM best paper award from IEICE in 2007. His

research interest is development methods and management methods forreliable ICT systems.