Mobile agent based scalable and responsive architecture for telecommunication network management

Abstract

Modern day telecommunication industry is facing ever increasing demand for more sophisticated services, higher quality and shorter times to market. Network operators and service providers in the telecommunications industry must meet these demands at a commercially viable cost and should have plans in place for any unforeseen changes, especially, in a complicated environment that distributed, often mobile, data, resources, service access and control. Moreover these networks are growing in size and complexity. In-fact, varied technologies, such as SONET, ATM, Ethernet, DWDM etc., present at different layers of the Access, Metro and Core (long haul) sections of the network, have contributed to the complexity in terms of their own framing and protocol structures. Faults and performance inefficiencies in these systems cause considerable business losses. Thus, controlling and managing the traffic in these networks is a challenging task. Network management system is a fundamental facilitator that typically gathers and analyzes huge amount of data from the network and makes decisions thereof for various functional areas of a management system. The term Network Management (NM) refers to the activities involving, operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning of network resource and services. The goal of network management is to ensure that the users of the network receive the information technology services with the quality of the service they expect. newlineExisting management models traditionally adopt a centralized, client/server (CS) approach wherein the management application, with the help of a manager, acting as clients, periodically accesses the data collected by a set of software modules, agents, placed on network devices by using an appropriate protocol. The functionality of both managers and the agents where managers act as client and the agents as a server is statically defined at design time. Traditionally, the Network Management (NM) scene has been dominated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)