Software architectures and network management: A parallel evolution

Abstract

CSELT 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o nWe are witnessing a progressive overlapping of many, once separated, pieces of the telecommunication world: transmission and switching boundaries are getting blurred, the concept of service cannot be easily partitioned into delivering and managing, the provisioning is entangled with operation, maintenance-. operation and network architectures are intertwined.This convergence will continue in the future, network nodes will take care of switching calls and transmission flows, management will be distributed in the network, services will dynamically be provided onto a variety of networks, service control/operation/creation will be more and more integrated properties of the service itself.The unifying force behind this has a name: software.Software has perculated in the telecom world from the sixties reaching every cranny but it has been dealt with as a separate topic, not in the main stream of the telecommunication technologies. Today many still argue that telecommunication is nothing but another field of application for software and that there should be nothing so peculiar to telecom to require a telecom software.In these very last years there is a growing perception of the deep relations between software and network evolution (including the service and management aspects).In the following we address what, in our view, this relation is, how we have to think about network evolution and software evolution together, and what are the steps toward this partnership. Of the many types of relationship we decided to focus on the one involving the network management, both because we feel it is going to be the first one to apply these ties and because it is the one the operating companies control most. .Network management evolutionIn this part we address only the issues of network management evolution having a strong relationship with software (e.g. we won't discuss the evolution of the functionalities, nor the growing importance of customer control services in NM).Network management began as a human activity and as such it was clearly separated from the network itself. This has branded the network management architectures up to our days, in spite of the sophistication achieved by the management, today largely performed through a variety of computers interconnected to the network and with each other.The Telecommunication Management Network architecture [M.30] is based on a separation between the telecommunication network and the management network, between management functions and managed objects. The first objective of the architecture was to standardize the interfaces between the 0-7803-0917-0/93$03.00 0 1993 IEEE 641 network and its management. The network is supposed to provide raw information to management functions that are outside of it.Do we need a separation between what is managed and what is managing? Are there working systems based on a different paradigm (namely a directly self managing mechanism -an object manages itself-or indirectly self managing structure -object A is managed b...

Vers La Reconfiguration Dynamique Dans Un Contexte Reparti:supports Et Methode

“…Pour que les objets puissent être autonomes ils doivent aussi assurer un minimum de fonctionnalités de gestion. A ces fins, la délégation d'une partie du contrôle, de la surveillance, et de la gestion du cycle de vie d'un objet est assurée par l'objet lui même [CAMP93,BOSC93,ARSE95d]. Cette propriété sera explicité dans le paragraphe §1.3.4.…”