Towards an Object-Oriented Framework for Multi-Domain Management

With the decentralization of computing resources into a varierty of possibly heterogeneous networks and with the advent of distributed computing, management of networks has become both more important and complex. Today, network management (NM) is mostly conducted employing the Internet (SNMP) or the OSI (CMIP) network management standards. With the introduction of the Corba industry-standard [OMG], at least some of the network management tasks are liely to be done using Corba in the future. A possible scenario may be the case of Customer Premises Networks (CPNs) with the carrier employing OSI NM to manage the services provided to the customer and the customer managing his part of the network using Corba technology. Given the fact that the carrier in some cases needs to have access to some of the customer's management information and vice versa, both parties involved need to convert information to / from the other management model used. The task of conversion is very complex and requires knowledge of the other party's management model. Interchange of management information becomes even more difficult when more than two parties are invloved, with each party using a different management model. In the worst case, each of the parties involved has to know the union of all management models used. Unfortunately, to know a management model doesn't yet mean to be able to program it since a lot of different APIs may exist for the same model. In OSI NM there is e.g. XOM/XMP [XOM] which is an X/Open standard, but is quite difficult to program and there are others such as the string-based balue notation of cmipWorks [cmipWorks].