Netflow Mediation

VympelCom is one of the leading Telecom and Internet Russian providers. This is the largest independent facilities-based provider of integrated telecommunications and internet services to businesses and other high-usage customers and telecommunications operators in major population centers throughout Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). We maintain OSS developed for Beeline and carried out several projects on development of new and porting and extending the capabilities of existing OSS components.

The Scope

To develop an Operations Support System module dedicated for detailed traffic collection used for billing clients.

The Challenge

Our team had to successfully extend the existing spatially dispersed and heterogeneous OSS and Service Provisioning System, that use a large number of physical devices, various protocols and software, and produce huge amount of data (up to several gigabytes a day), without even having access to the real system – working only with models and emulators.

The Solution

The original OSS, developed within VympelCom, relied on Netflow version 5 protocol for collecting data from routers. Open-source programs cflowd and cfdcollect (http://www.caida.org), written in C, were used as collector and at the server to store data in ARTS format, respectively. There was a developed in-house Java-processor that parsed ARTS files (ARTS-parsing components were ported from open-source C library arts++) and compiled the information ordered by time (per hour) and IP-address into an Oracle database. Azoft improved this system by modifying cflowd, cfdcollect and Java-processor to allow for retaining information on Type of Service byte in IP protocol, that is used in Quality of Service concept – differentiating in bandwidth and reliability for different clients with different sort of traffic (IP-TV or streaming media versus static pages), and on original IP-address instead of subnet.

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