Experiences in Multi-domain Management Service Development

The developers of management systems and the management services that operate over them will be faced with increasing complexity as services are developed for the open service market. This paper presents experiences in the development of management services that span several administrative domains and which are therefore representative of the complexities of the open service market. The work described involved the development of TMN based management systems that provided management services in support of multimedia teleservices operating over broadband networks

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

Intelligent Integrated Management for Telecommunication Networks

As the size of communication networks keeps on growing, faster connections, cooperating technologies and the divergence of equipment and data communications, the management of the resulting networks gets additional important and time-critical. More advanced tools are needed to support this activity. In this article we describe the design and implementation of a management platform using Artificial Intelligent reasoning technique. For this goal we make use of an expert system. This study focuses on an intelligent framework and a language for formalizing knowledge management descriptions and combining them with existing OSI management model. We propose a new paradigm where the intelligent network management is integrated into the conceptual repository of management information called Managed Information Base (MIB). This paper outlines the development of an expert system prototype based in our propose GDMO+ standard and describes the most important facets, advantages and drawbacks that were found after prototyping our proposal

Inter-Domain Integration of Services and Service Management

The evolution of the global telecommunications industry into an open services market presents developers of telecommunication service and management systems with many new challenges. Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of service and management systems over multiple organisational domains. These integration issues have been examined in the ACTS project Prospect by developing a working set of integrated, managed telecommunications services for a user trial. This paper presents the initial results of this work detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services

Telecommunication Services Engineering- Definitions, Architectures and Tools

This paper introduces telecommunication services engineering through a definition of services, of network architectures that run services, and of methods, techniques and tools used to develop services. We emphasize the Intelligent Network (IN), the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) and TINA architecture

The Impact of the Internet on Telecommunication Architectures

The ever-growing popularity of the Internet is dramatically changing the landscape of the communications market place. The two separate worlds of the Internet and Telecommunications are converging. The respective advantages of the two environments are being integrated to fulfill the promise of the information super-highways. In this paper, we examine the impact of the Internet on the main telecommunication architectures, namely the IN, the TMN and TINA. There are two new tendencies for implementing telephony services in combination with the Internet: running part of the control sys tem over the Internet, or conveying both the user data and the control information over the Internet. We examine these two trends, and elaborate on possible ways of salvaging the best parts of the work achieved by the TINA-Consortium in the Internet context

Event management of large distributed system and network management environments

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Co-ordinated event management across system, network and application environments is a challenging task. The wide diversity of industry and commercial standards, differing business and technical requirements and a huge variety of environments mean there are no simple solutions. This thesis proposes a highly scaleable, flexible and resilient event management architecture that has been applied to the outsourcing activities of HP Services worldwide. Our solution is based on industry standards such as SNMP and commercial products. It provides a framework for all aspects of event management, including event detection, logging, notification, and correlation. It was initially applied and refined in an outsourcing IT environment, then further developed in larger outsourcing environments. It was developed using a standard solution architecture methodology (known as ITSA) that enabled the partly developed architectures to be continually refined, improved and deployed. The technology aspects of the solution work closely with ITIL event management processes. To achieve a unified event display and a standardised event message format, all events from all sources are reduced to a standard format that includes the “raw” event information plus business intelligence, called the business string, added to the event for display and routing purposes. This extra information identifies the nature of the event and allows filtered displays of events. It is extracted from configuration management extensions added to the standard event management tools. The extended format is flexible enough to handle the different commercial tools. The first generation of the solution was based on Computer Associates’ Unicenter TNG and was called the Event Monitoring Utility (EMU). This was later significantly extended by switching to HP OpenView, and the extra development of further central event management functions, especially event correlation, in a solution called DECADE. Significant agent extensions were achieved by the creation and deployment of a solution called SMSPI, which included an extended configuration management and policy database, and further event automation. The extended solution is now deployed across HP Services’ entire global outsourced environment. The solution has proven very successful, winning two Computer Associates Software Achievement Awards, including the Grand Prize, and generating two US patents. It will be progressively deployed to several million servers and network devices globally over the next few years. The work described here is at once self-contained and a basis for on-going development of event management in the face of ever more complex systems, and increasing demands for more detailed event management

Towards Automated Network Configuration Management

Modern networks are designed to satisfy a wide variety of competing goals related to network operation requirements such as reachability, security, performance, reliability and availability. These high level goals are realized through a complex chain of low level configuration commands performed on network devices. As networks become larger, more complex and more heterogeneous, human errors become the most significant threat to network operation and the main cause of network outage. In addition, the gap between high-level requirements and low-level configuration data is continuously increasing and difficult to close. Although many solutions have been introduced to reduce the complexity of configuration management, network changes, in most cases, are still manually performed via low--level command line interfaces (CLIs). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has introduced NETwork CONFiguration (NETCONF) protocol along with its associated data--modeling language, YANG, that significantly reduce network configuration complexity. However, NETCONF is limited to the interaction between managers and agents, and it has weak support for compliance to high-level management functionalities. We design and develop a network configuration management system called AutoConf that addresses the aforementioned problems. AutoConf is a distributed system that manages, validates, and automates the configuration of IP networks. We propose a new framework to augment NETCONF/YANG framework. This framework includes a Configuration Semantic Model (CSM), which provides a formal representation of domain knowledge needed to deploy a successful management system. Along with CSM, we develop a domain--specific language called Structured Configuration language to specify configuration tasks as well as high--level requirements. CSM/SCL together with NETCONF/YANG makes a powerful management system that supports network--wide configuration. AutoConf supports two levels of verifications: consistency verification and behavioral verification. We apply a set of logical formalizations to verifying the consistency and dependency of configuration parameters. In behavioral verification, we present a set of formal models and algorithms based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) to capture the behaviors of forwarding control lists that are deployed in firewalls, routers, and NAT devices. We also adopt an enhanced version of Dyna-Q algorithm to support dynamic adaptation of network configuration in response to changes occurred during network operation. This adaptation approach maintains a coherent relationship between high level requirements and low level device configuration. We evaluate AutoConf by running several configuration scenarios such as interface configuration, RIP configuration, OSPF configuration and MPLS configuration. We also evaluate AutoConf by running several simulation models to demonstrate the effectiveness and the scalability of handling large-scale networks