Unified Management Information Model For Conncection-Oriented And Connectionless Networks

Management information model is one of the central issues of network management. Network management activities are based on management information model. Traditional management information models are designed for connection-oriented networks. Models for connectionless networks are also built over recent years. However, the existing models are dedicated for either connection-oriented or connectionless network technology, not designed for hybrid network management. With the development of IP and Ethernet technologies, connectionless networks are becoming more and more important. Network convergence continues with the use of Ethernet and IP technologies in the core of a carrier network in conjunction with traditional connection-oriented network technologies. Nowadays, the collaboration between connection-oriented and connectionless network technologies has become an important trend and single technology networks are changing into hybrid network. But the complexity of hybrid networks has brought new difficulties to network management, so network management has to adapt itself to the new conditions. Since a hybrid network is a mixture of multiple different technologies, a unified management information model must be defined for hybrid network management.This paper proposes a unified management information model for connectionless and connection-oriented networks which is not only applicable to pure connection-oriented or connectionless networks, but especially helpful to the management of hybrid networks. This model is generic that it is not designed for any certain kind of networks. It is also defined in a technology-independent way that the model can be implemented with CORBA, XML, etc. This paper includes the following specific work: (1) Analyzed and compared three kinds of functional architectures of transport networks:connection-oriented, connectionless and unified, which provides the theoretical basis for unified management information modeling.(2) Defined the information object classes (IOCs) and their attributes, behaviors and notifications. This model combines the characteristics of the two types of networks and extracts the common things. Inheritance technology is also used here to give this model the capability of details description.(3) Described the relationship between the information object classes, which includes containment, inheritance and association relationship.(4) Defined an inter-layer and intra-layer relationship model for connectionless and connection-oriented layer networks. Since server and client layer networks can be connection-oriented or connectionless in hybrid networks, there are four kinds of compositions. This paper analyzes those intra-layer and inter-layer relationships.