Track: Telecommunications
Using GIS To Manage Operation of Undersea Cable Communication Network
Zhu ZeshengSun Ling , Guan Hengshen
The communication industry based on undersea cable is more complex, dynamic, and competitive. Many factors, such as the undersea geographic environment, technology, and management level of the undersea cable communication network, economics, and marketing, interactively influence this business. In recent years, the operation management system of the undersea cable communication network (OMS-UCCN) has been widely researched and quickly developed. However, how to reasonably apply various existent information processing techniques for designing and implementing satisfactory OMS-UCCNs not only is much limited, but also their function, quality, and performance are usually unsatisfactory. This is because OMS-UCCN usually must collect and process a lot of spatial information relevant to network operation and fault diagnosis as well as prediction (especially including some random or undetermined information) and provide as precise as possible decision information for its managers. Thus, OMS-UCCN involves decision making based on complex interactions between time, the undersea cable, the undersea geographic environment, user traffic, and various fault situations relevant to OMS-UCCN operation. Modeling these interactions and representing them in OMS-UCCN for decision support have presented difficulties in its design and implementation with traditional design methods. However, our research has shown that one key to solve the problem is to use a GIS-based system as one basic framework for effectively implementing the information processing in OMS-UCCN. Further, the framework can support fast design and implementation of high-quality OMS-UCCNs. In this paper, we present a new method of building OMS-UCCNs on the framework. This method applies three key information processing techniques: GIS, simulation, and expert system (ES). The OMS-UCCN based on this framework not only makes use of its advantages as much as possible, but also has much better performance than most existent OMS-UCCNs. We selected ArcView GIS as the framework and obtained a high-quality OMS-UCCN. In fact, the framework provides a very good object-oriented environment to build and integrate all components such as classes and objects in OMS-UCCN and implement them through both analysis and design stages. In our OMS-UCCN, ArcView GIS is used also as an effective tool to store, analyze, and display spatially referenced data for efficient management for resources in the OMS-UCCN. On the other hand, it is also the most important module of OMS-UCCN and used as a basic integration environment for overall OMS-UCCN implementation. Thus, the simulation module built by continuous and discrete simulation techniques is used mainly to process deterrent information relevant to OMS-UCCNs. The expert system module is designed by the knowledge shop method. Each component of the module is controlled by an independently running program. The module uses the information from the simulation module and database for reasoning and provides the suggestion and decision information using the GIS module. This OMS-UCCN has advantages such as simple implementation; easy verification, management, and maintenance; fast information processing; and high-quality management. For showing the practical application value and steps of our method, a typical OMS-UCCN was designed for implementing the operation management of local undersea cable communication network. The real project resulted in a prototype called OMS-UCCN-1. The primary consideration of OMS-UCCN-1 was to optimally manage a local undersea cable communication network. The OMS-UCCN-1 tasks mainly include management of the network performance and faults. OMS-UCCN-1 was developed on a PC-based network environment under the Microsoft Windows system using Visual Basic, Visual C++, Avenue, and ArcView GIS.
Zhu Zesheng
JiangSu Academy of Agricultural Sciences
JiangSu Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Nanjing, JIANGSU 210014
P.R., CHINA
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