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Nortel - Object Oriented Databases vs Relational Databases

Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database

Nortel, Sprint
(Cell Phone Base Station Management)

Nortel, the largest supplier of telecommunications equipment in North America, built the system in use today for the Sprint PCS cell phone network. Starting with the Qualcomm CDMA technology, they were able to use the ODBMS capabilities to extend the system and customize it as needed, something that would be extremely difficult in (O)RDBMS technology. Their application is a base station manager (BSM) that stores configuration and fault information for a set of CDMA cell sites (Base Transceiver Site, BTS). Their key DBMS requirements were:

Performance: The performance of the BSM is important to managing an adequate number of BTS cell sites. Higher performance allows for more cell sites to be managed by a single BSM and adds deployment value to the BSM product.

Time to Market: Wireless service providers are building out their infrastructure to support the growing wireless market. Base station management software availability is a critical factor in gaining market share in this market. Nortel's choice of base station management software components was strongly driven by this criterion. See, also, QUALCOMM, above, to understand the basic use of the ODBMS technology, the starting point from which Nortel extended the system.


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