Immediate Mobility Number Portability: Cloud Database Appliance

Platform to Provide Central Portability

Katelaris Leonidas

, Themistocleous Marinos

and Brasca Fabrizio

BTO Research, Italy

Wind Tre, Italy

Keywords:

Data Processing, Mobile Number Portability, Data Analytics.

Abstract:

The ongoing “era of data” arise challenges and issues on analysing huge volumes of data in an efﬁcient way,

developing applications and services that leverage the beneﬁts of cloud infrastructures alongside with fast

data processing services. Despite, the large number of different applications migrated in cloud, there still

applications that are not frequently met on cloud infrastructures. Applications deﬁned as time critical or data-

intensive are applications of this kind. The need of high resilience alongside with high performance lead

these types of applications to run on mainframes, than in cloud infrastructures, as cloud is not able to satisfy

them under strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and with- out predictable performance. The aim of this

paper is to report research issues around time critical and data-intensive applications deployed in cloud and

present Immediate Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Use- Case migration to cloud infrastructure, which aim

to provide portability nation-wide.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud services usage is growing with fast speed, of-

fering solutions for even more complicated applica-

tions to be hosted in cloud infrastructures. Despite

the growing, cloud infrastructures could not serve in

an efﬁcient way application or services that are char-

acterised as time critical and data-intensive applica-

tions. As of the ongoing ”era of data”, the need of

cloud infrastructures able to provide solutions to time

critical and data-intensive, is even more essential.

During this paper, the authors demonstrate the

MNP Use Case migration to cloud infrastructures us-

ing predictable performance suggested by EU project,

to meet Key Process Indicators (KPIs) and serve ap-

plication at ideal performance and high resilience.

Mobile Number Portability (MNP), is a major pro-

cess for mobile network operators, which is in the fo-

cus of this paper. The MNP process is taking place

when a customer signs a new contract with another

operator (the recipient operator). Following, the re-

cipient operator sends the MNP request to the opera-

tor (the donator operator) where the customer is cur-

rently hosted and asks for the current customer to re-

move to its network. The MNP process terminates

when customer is moved to the new operator. Tak-

ing into account, the lack of a centralised database

where all telephone numbers in Italy will be hosted,

alongside with the high complexity of the processes

taking place during the MNP process, state the whole

process as an open issue. The lack of a centralised

database in Italy requires strong integration between

the different ICT (Information and Communication

Technology) systems of the mobile network operators

operated in Italy.

2 REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

The high complexity of the process and the lack of

a centralised database for the mobile phone numbers

in Italy arise multiple challenges for mobile number

network operators. Upcoming section tries, to give to

the reader a better view of the process, the following

paragraph describes the MNP process from the cus-

tomer point of view as this presented in Figure 1.

• Stage 1 - Insert MNP Request: A customer signs

a new contract with recipient operator asking for

number portability.

• Stage 2 - Quota Restriction: At the end of each

day (around 19:00 CET) and after all shops (net-

work operator shops) are closed, a system check

is performed to check if MNP requests submitted

Leonidas, K., Marinos, T. and Fabrizio, B.

Immediate Mobility Number Portability: Cloud Database Appliance Platform to Provide Central Portability.

DOI: 10.5220/0007877306210624

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2019), pages 621-624

ISBN: 978-989-758-365-0

621

during the day, meet the quota threshold for each

operator. Quota for each operator in Italy is set

from the Italian Communications authority (AG-

COM, )

• Stage 3 - Request Check: During the next three

days, multiple checks are made from each of the

involved operators such as possibility of blocked

number, unpaid bills, ongoing MNP request to

third operator etc.

• Stage 4 - Port-in - Port-out: After the three days

period early in the early morning (the portability

of the number is complete with maximum service

loss of two hours. The old SIM card is deactivated

and that it cannot receive service by the donor.

Figure 1: Mobile Number Portability Use Case Diagram.

Each of the above stages is subdivided into sub-

processes running through each stage. Starting from

the ﬁrst stage ”Insert MNP Request”, the user could

visit the shop of a telecommunication provider and

ask to move his telephone number to the new provider

ﬁlling a portability contract form. To be able to get a

number portability, customer gets a Subscriber Iden-

tity Module (SIM) card from recipient operator. Most

of the times, customers who sign portability contract,

they already have a SIM card. The recipient operator

activates the new SIM card with a ”new” number, so

the customer immediately is able to receive or make

calls to the ”new” number. During this time the old

SIM card with the customer’s number is operated by

the donor.

Following, is the second stage ”Quota Restric-

tion”, where each operator proceeds speciﬁc number

of requests each day, as a regulatory requirement. All

requests over quota are queued in a waiting list, as

they are scheduled to be proceeded the next day. This

action is taking place every day after 19:30CET, when

all shops (telecommunication provider’s shops) close.

Coming after, the stage ”Request Check”, where do-

nator operator checks if the port-out requests are rea-

sonable before proceed them to the next step. Reasons

for decline a port-out request include unpaid bills,

blocked number, ongoing number portability to an-

other operator etc. This procedures are taking place

during the next three days after the portability num-

ber request is submitted.

The ﬁnal stage of the MNP process called ”Port-

in Port-out”, includes the sub- processes of port-in

and port-out. As a result of the successful ”Request

Check”, all proceeded requests are submitted to the

ﬁnal step. The recipient operator imports all suc-

cessfully checked numbers to its system. After the

completion of port-in, recipient operator informs the

donor operator for the completion. Then, the donator

remove (port-out), all those numbers from its systems.

Actions in this ﬁnal step are taking place early in the

morning (06:00 - 08:00CET), with two hours of max-

imum service lost for the customer.

Previously presented stages compose the MNP

process, which is currently running in Italy includ-

ing high complexity between different systems with

the need for strong integration between telecommuni-

cation providers in Italy. The current status is very

time consuming and costly for telecommunication

providers, looking ways to reduce cost, time and ser-

vice failures.

To address this issue, a Database as a Service is

proposed through EU project called European Cloud

Database Appliance (CDBA) (CDBA, ). The reli-

able cloud database appliance deriving from the EU

project is proposing a new cloud architecture, which

is focused on visualisation on service level instead

of hardware level. One of the innovations derived

from the proposed cloud architecture is that the setup

for physical resources that will be consumed by each

query/ client will be managed during run-time, pro-

viding predictable performance for data- intensive

applications. To achieve that beyond others, the

project behind CDBA will investigate research results

form ﬁve real-life use cases in three different sectors:

Banking , Telecommunication and Retail.

Figure 2: AGCOM Centralised Database for Domestic

Phone Numbers.

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622

3 CLOUD DATABASE

APPLIANCE PLATFORM

The mission of the database appliance is to provide an

ultra-scalable operational database with analytical ca-

pabilities leveraging an efﬁcient storage engine and be

able to scale up on advance hardware platform. Be-

low a brief presentation of cloud database appliance

main components is made.

• Operational Database: the ultra-scalable opera-

tional database is based on a new version of

LeanXcale (LeanXcale, ) operational database

with a new storage engine able to run ef-

ﬁciently in-memory, with full NUMA (Non-

uniform Memory Access) awareness.

• Multi-core hardware platform: the hardware

where the cloud database appliance will be

hosted, will be provided by ATOS (ATOS, ).

The hardware platform will be equipped with

32CPUs (896 Cores) able to scale up, alongside

with120TB of main memory in a single computer.

• Analytical Database: An in-memory analytical

engine will be designed and provided by Active-

Viam (ACTIVEVIAM, ), which will be able to

scale up efﬁciently based on NUMA architecture,

integrated with LeanXcale to supply fast analyti-

cal queries over operational data.

• Streaming Analytics Engine: Data streaming en-

gine is designed able to scale up to several 1000s

of cores and well integrated with LeanXcale sup-

ports real-time analytics algorithms over the oper-

ational data.

• Incremental Parallel Analytics Algorithms: A set

of incremental analytic algorithms are designed to

run over operational data.

4 MOBILE NUMBER

PORTABILITY SERVICE IN

CLOUD DATABASE

APPLIANCE

Deployment of Mobile Number Portability Service in

cloud database appliance embraces risks in time and

service failures. Following, a description of main

risks and requirements for MNP service to run on

cloud database appliance.

Current status in Italy for mobile phone num-

bers is confusing and complicated. Before moving to

cloud platform a major altering has to be made in cur-

rent processes around mobile phone numbers hosting.

According to that, the authors propose a centralised

database (Fig.2), where all mobile phone numbers

will be hosted and operated by AGCOM (AGCOM,

), who will be responsible to keep references for all

mobile numbers operated by Italian telecommunica-

tion providers.

Following, is a description of MNP service func-

tionalities and KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) to

be met on cloud database appliance platform. The

centralised database where all domestic phone num-

bers hosted, will be able to handle about 100 mil-

lion phone numbers with references for operations by

telecommunication providers. Based on that the cloud

database appliance should meet the following terms:

• MNP Service process should end in less than 24

hours

• Availability of the service must be 99,9%

• Able to manage 100.000 MNP requests per day

and online check validation (time for response to

queries less than 2 seconds)

• Able to check the status of 1.000.000 requests per

day (response-time less than1 second)

• Able to handle 1 billion requests per hour for

check routing number (response time less than 0.1

second)

All the above requirements should lead to Reduces

TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and Operations and

improve customer experience in MNP service.

4.1 Conclusions

Mobile Number Portability is a challenging process

for the Italian telecommunication providers. In this

work, the description and design of the MNP pro-

cess, which constitute one of the ﬁve use case of

CloudDBAppliance project presented. The primary

objective for this use case is the migration of the use

case cloud infrastructure as this will be provided by

the CloudDBAppliance platform with predictable per-

formance, alongside with the supply of a centralised

database where all the Italian telephone numbers will

be hosted, eliminating confusions and complex of the

portability process.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“This project has received funding from the European

Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro-

gramme under grant agreement No 732051”.

Immediate Mobility Number Portability: Cloud Database Appliance Platform to Provide Central Portability

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REFERENCES

ACTIVEVIAM. In-memory analytical database, active-

viam.

AGCOM, I. c. a. Italian communications authority.

ATOS. Atos.

CDBA, C. D. A. Cloud database appliance.

LeanXcale. Leanxcale.

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