Detecting OAM&P design defects using a feature interaction approach

SUMMARY In the telecommunications service engineering world, the feature interaction (FI) problem is defined as the situation in which running services at the same time undesirably alters their behaviour. It is also known as the service interaction problem. FIs may occur between various types of services, ranging from signalling protocol features to value‐added end‐user services. The problem has been widely investigated for those types of services. However, sufficient attention has not been paid to operation, administration, management and provisioning (OAM&P) features like creating a new customer account or registering a new gateway as part of the network. The present paper addresses the detection of OAM&P FIs in Internet telephony architectures. The solution consists in an adapted version of a known FI detection method. A simple feature modelling language and an FI detection procedure are proposed. A validation with a case study is also reported. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.