Corba-based Network Management Model Design

The predominant models to perform network and systems management have traditionally been SNMP and CMIP. However, SNMP is beginning to reach its limits when more complex management tasks are to be performed, and CMIP ?owing to its complexity and slow standardization process - has not yet gained the same acceptance as SNMP.The advent of object-oriented distributed processing models has brought forward a third candidate, CORBA, originally not targeted specifically at management tasks, but in many respects nevertheless suitable for managing both local and wide area networks.CORBA is more powerful than SNMP and less complex than CMIP. Its affiliation with C++, a widely used programming language, lends it to immediate use by ahuge number of programmers and allows them to introduce distribution into their programs without a too drastic change of philosophy.It is therefore assumed that CORBA will become important in the network and systems management domain as well as in the distributed systems domain. To be more precise, CORBA will be used to implement management applications (managers) and managed entities (agents).Therefore, the need arises to manage a system written in one model from a system written in a different model, for example to manage an OSI agent using a CORBA-based manager. Assuming that CORBA will achieve broad acceptance in the management world, it would be desirable to be able to manage other models transparently from CORBA. The benefits would be investment protection of existing managed entities, the opening of the SNMP- and CMIP-dominated management world to management-inexperienced(CORBA) programmers, and the unification of management in one common, simple, and yet powerful model.The goal of the thesis is to discusss the Topology Discovery which is the basis of Network Management and to examine how CORBA can be used for network and systems management. As for the latter ,the focus is on the client side; that is, how CORBA can be used to implement management applications that access managed entities, rather than how CORBA can be used to implement managed entities.The thesis consists of six chapters.Content is dispatched as follows: Chapter 1 introduces simply the network management.Chapter 2 interprets the traditional network management,such as OSI Management,TMN Management and Internet Management.Chapter 3 describes the Topology Discovery.including the algorithm and the implementing mechanism. Chapter 4 is the main chapter and will present the design of the integrated object model(IOM). Chapter 5 integrates SNMP to IOM as an application;Chapter 6, namely the last chapter, summarizes the whole thesis and prospects the future study.