Static vs. Dynamic CMIP/SNMP Network Management Using CORBA

The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of modern networks is pushing industry and research to look for a single and consistent way of managing networks. With the advent of open object-oriented distributing computing models such as CORBA, there are efforts to make the operational and management models the same, i.e. to manage and operate the network using CORBA. The aim of this paper is to show some techniques that allow to manage CMIP/SNMP network resources using CORBA. Static techniques which map each managed object class into a corresponding CORBA interface are compared with dynamic techniques which rely on runtime information. Finally this paper demonstrates that CORBA-based network management applications are becoming attractive in terms of efficiency and application size, overcoming limitations of early solutions.

Also appeared in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1238, p. 303-14, 1997