Power Systems Monitoring and Control using Telecom Network Management Standards

Historically, different solutions have been developed for power systems control and telecommunications network management environments. The former was characterized by proprietary solutions, while the latter has been involved for years in a strong standardization process guided by criteria of openness. Today, power systems control standardization is in progress, but it is at an early stage compared to the telecommunications management area, especially in terms of information modeling. Today, control equipment tends to exhibit more computational power, and communication lines have increased their performance. These trends hint at some conceptual convergence between power systems and telecommunications networks from a management perspective. This convergence leads us to suggest the application of well-established telecommunications management standards for power systems control. This paper shows that this is a real medium-to-long term possibility

A web services based framework for efficient monitoring and event reporting.

Network and Service Management (NSM) is a research discipline with significant research contributions the last 25 years. Despite the numerous standardised solutions that have been proposed for NSM, the quest for an "all encompassing technology" still continues. A new technology introduced lately to address NSM problems is Web Services (WS). Despite the research effort put into WS and their potential for addressing NSM objectives, there are efficiency, interoperability, etc issues that need to be solved before using WS for NSM. This thesis looks at two techniques to increase the efficiency of WS management applications so that the latter can be used for efficient monitoring and event reporting. The first is a query tool we built that can be used for efficient retrieval of management state data close to the devices where they are hosted. The second technique is policies used to delegate a number of tasks from a manager to an agent to make WS-based event reporting systems more efficient. We tested the performance of these mechanisms by incorporating them in a custom monitoring and event reporting framework and supporting systems we have built, against other similar mechanisms (XPath) that have been proposed for the same tasks, as well as previous technologies such as SNMP. Through these tests we have shown that these mechanisms are capable of allowing us to use WS efficiently in various monitoring and event reporting scenarios. Having shown the potential of our techniques we also present the design and implementation challenges for building a GUI tool to support and enhance the above systems with extra capabilities. In summary, we expect that other problems WS face will be solved in the near future, making WS a capable platform for it to be used for NSM

Quality of service management for non-guaranteed networks

The increasing dominance of multimedia communication posed new requirements for the underlying systems. Multimedia data, formally called continuous media, has time constraints that impose real time limitations for their transmission. Certain levels of service, called Quality of Service (QoS), need to be considered when handling continuous media. The present work utilizes QoS concepts for networks that do not have inherent QoS support. The thesis aims at verifying the possibility of having QoS-controlled communication on non-guaranteed networks. A basic QoS architecture is designed where already existing QoS concepts are adapted to work with non-guaranteed networks. The architecture provides the facilities of QoS specification, mapping, admission, maintenance, monitoring and notification. In addition, a new concept for predictive QoS admission is introduced. The proposed architecture was verified using a prototype system. The results showed an increased percentage of continuous media that arrive on time to their receivers (good put) with higher network loads. The increased good put was at the expense of high network overhead

A Generic Network and System Management Framework

Networks and distributed systems have formed the basis of an ongoing communications revolution that has led to the genesis of a wide variety of services. The constantly increasing size and complexity of these systems does not come without problems. In some organisations, the deployment of Information Technology has reached a state where the benefits from downsizing and rightsizing by adding new services are undermined by the effort required to keep the system running. Management of networks and distributed systems in general has a straightforward goal: to provide a productive environment in which work can be performed effectively. The work required for management should be a small fraction of the total effort. Most IT systems are still managed in an ad hoc style without any carefully elaborated plan. In such an environment the success of management decisions depends totally on the qualification and knowledge of the administrator. The thesis provides an analysis of the state of the art in the area of Network and System Management and identifies the key requirements that must be addressed for the provisioning of Integrated Management Services. These include the integration of the different management related aspects (i.e. integration of heterogeneous Network, System and Service Management). The thesis then proposes a new framework, INSMware, for the provision of Management Services. It provides a fundamental basis for the realisation of a new approach to Network and System Management. It is argued that Management Systems can be derived from a set of pre-fabricated and reusable Building Blocks that break up the required functionality into a number of separate entities rather than being developed from scratch. It proposes a high-level logical model in order to accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Network and System Management that can be used as a reference model. A development methodology is introduced that reflects principles of the proposed approach, and provides guidelines to structure the analysis, design and implementation phases of a management system. The INSMware approach can further be combined with the componentware paradigm for the implementation of the management system. Based on these principles, a prototype for the management of SNMP systems has been implemented using industry standard middleware technologies. It is argued that development of a management system based on Componentware principles can offer a number of benefits. INSMware Components may be re-used and system solutions will become more modular and thereby easier to construct and maintain

Integration of the Helpdesk with SNMP Management: A Case Study Approach

This paper reports research on the integration of Help Desk systems with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The research develops an architectural framework for the deployment of SNMP protocols integrated with a help desk infrastructure. The methodology involves case study evaluations and research towards the development of a SNMP network management application framework integrated with the Help Desk. This is accomplished in two parts: part one involves the identification of human roles and tasks (scenario analysis) followed by an interaction analysis of representative scenarios. Part two involves the investigation of the network management support tools currently used for Fault/Change management in telecommunication networks. This leads to the identifications of gaps in the support tools of existing systems. A case study methodology is adopted to analyse practical scenarios based on concepts, such as roles, interactions, artefacts and tools in a real application environment. Finally an integrated architectural framework for SNMP based Help Desk network management is proposed and analysed

Objetos distribuidos sobre TCP/IP

Peer Reviewe

Supervision et contrôle des réseaux et services : retour vers le futur

Colloque sur invitation. nationale.National audienceLe domaine de la gestion des réseaux et services s'est développé depuis 1984, date des premières velléités d'aboutir à une approche intégrée, principalement via une action forte de normalisation. Tout au long de ces 15 dernières années de recherche, de développement, de standardisation et de normalisation, le domaine a énormément évolué. De la normalisation initiale qui s'est poursuivie jusqu'en 1995, sont issus un modèle fédérateur, i.e. le modèle Gestionnaire/Agent/Base d'Information de Gestion (MIB) et de nombreux concepts (gestion multi-domaines, services de base, modèles d'alarmes, ). Depuis, ce modèle a été décliné dans de multiples approches "normatives" (normes OSI, normes de l'UIT-T, standards de l'IETF, documents du DMTF, ). Pour chacune de ces approches, des solutions logicielles conséquentes (plateformes, toolkits d'agent, ) pour la mise en oeuvre sont ou ont été proposées. Aujourd'hui, le monde de la gestion des réseaux et services est multi-normes, chacune tentant de couvrir une niche, tout en empiétant le plus possible sur la niche des approches voisines. Si les raisons de cette évolution sont évidentes, le résultat, i.e. une multitude d'approches à la fois concurrentes et complémentaires est pour le moins déconcertant. C'est dans ce contexte de crise de la normalisation, de révolution des fondements du domaine face à l'émergence conjointe de nouvelles technologies support mais également l'expression croissante de nouveaux besoins que se place notre intervention. L'objectif du tutoriel est triple : (1) donner au participant une vision précise de l'évolution du domaine sur les 15 dernières années, (2) décrire les approches émergeantes et les confronter aux besoins des services en forte croissance, (3) présenter les défis que la recherche en supervision et contrôle des réseaux devra relever dans la prochaine décennie

VINEA: a policy-based virtual network embedding architecture

Network virtualization has enabled new business models by allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical network. To concurrently run multiple customized virtual network services, such infrastructure providers need to run a virtual network embedding protocol. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto the physical network. We present the design and implementation of a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the (invariant) embedding mechanisms: resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel policy configurations are compared over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities.National Science Foundation (CNS-0963974

Distributed control of reconfigurable mobile network agents for resource coordination

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.Considering the tremendous growth of internet applications and network resource federation proposed towards future open access network (FOAN), the need to analyze the robustness of the classical signalling mechanisms across multiple network operators cannot be over-emphasized. It is envisaged, there will be additional challenges in meeting the bandwidth requirements and network management...The first objective of this project is to describe the networking environment based on the support for heterogeneity of network components..