Customer service management: An information model for communication services

Abstract

Customer Service Management (CSM) offers a management interface between customer and service provider, which enables customers to individually monitor and control their subscribed services. In order to model Customer Service Management for communication services, this paper proposes a protocol and technology-independent in- formation model, which incoporates the individual quality of service parameters (QoS parameters) that are specified in customer-specific service level agreements (SLAs), and the logical infrastructure that is used to implement the communication service. The information model is validated for a real-life management environment. This work has been carried out at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Germany as part of a research project that is supervised by the German Research Network Organization (\DFN-Verein"), and funded by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology.