TR-069 ACS ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW

DMS is a middleware application, based on J2EE.

Middleware is the glue between otherwise separate functions to create end-to-end-applications. For example, a device management application may need to connect to a subscriber database to enable the activation of correct settings and subscriptions during provisioning. Instead of accessing the database directly, the device management application does so through an Application Server acting as middleware, which provides a set of common services, such as security, transaction management, load-balancing and failover.

Some of the business issues driving the wide adoption of middleware include:

• The need to connect new applications to legacy infrastructure in a mixed-architecture environment
• The desire to insulate network and service infrastructure decisions from the application, allowing system managers to make infrastructure decisions without restrictions imposed by applications that depend on proprietary protocols or features
• The desire to redeploy business logic at will and unconstrained by infrastructure; this necessitates using open APIs and protocols, which are widely supported across most infrastructure products
• The desire to consolidate generic services and the management of these services
• The desire to provide centralized application management, including maintenance, recovery, load balancing, and monitoring
• The desire to use open services and protocols

For a TR-069 ACS to function properly, it must have access to subscriber data, but as a device exposed to the Internet, maintaining that data on the ACS is a significant security risk. As such, the ACS typically only stores information specific to the managed devices and any association with the subscriber is maintained on isolated databases.

In a TR-069 environment, the security issue cannot be understated. A TR-069 ACS is directly connected to and accessible from the internet. Placing confidential subscriber data on such a system is a significant security risk. Instead, accessing the database via a Application Server with a long history of secure operation in such an environment is the best practice when it comes to protecting confidential subscriber data.

An ACS, having valuable applications to the carrier, must be able to integrate with the carrier’s existing systems. Requiring the carrier to replace all existing business logic, such as ordering and operations systems to support an ACS is not feasible. As such, the middleware approach where the ACS’ functionality is added to the existing infrastructure is the only viable solution.

For some smaller carriers without an elaborate OSS, the middleware approach is still valid.

Using J2EE as the foundation for middleware servers provides a proven, tested, widely deployed architecture that eliminates the first-level qualification for which a proprietary architecture must be tested. J2EE’s core functions are known quantities with a huge developer community constantly working on improving all these issues. The same can’t be said for a proprietary system.

From a fundamental level, J2EE is a widely deployed and proven platform that handles all the complex low-level server details such as multithreading, synchronization, resource allocation, life-cycle management, transaction tracking, session and state. Issues like scalability, clustering, performance and security have already been solved with best-practices widely available and well documented. This allows deployments to focus on supporting business process requirements rather than inventing in-house application infrastructure.

Companies protect their investment by adopting the J2EE platform, since it is an industry-supported standard and not a vendor-defined architecture. This allows not only the applications to become vendor-independent and release the organizations from a single source, but the same J2EE application executable can run on any system that supports the J2EE platform: Linux, Unix, Solaris, BSD, Windows. Supported application Servers include Oracle WebLogic and RedHat JBoss.