FR2788915A1 - AGENT HAVING HIGH-LEVEL INTERFACES WITHIN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT NETWORK - Google Patents

Abstract

Agent for a network management system, in particular in accordance with the recommendations of the X.700 series of the ITU-T, said system further comprising at least one manager, said agent comprising a plurality of managed objects associated with resources of said network , each of said managed objects having an interface allowing said at least one manager to access the properties contained in said managed objects, and said agent also having at least one so-called high-level interface, allowing said at least one manager to access services contained in said agent. The invention is particularly applicable to telecommunications management networks (TMNs) as presented in the M. 3000 series of recommendations of the ITU-T.

Description

The present invention relates to an agent in a management architecture.

  networks, in particular telecommunications networks, in accordance with the recommendations of the X.700 series of the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union). Recommendation M.3010 entitled "Principles for a Telecommunications Management Network" presents the general architecture of a Telecommunications Management Network (TMN, or TMN for Telecommunication Management Network, which is illustrated in FIG. 1). this recommendation, the network management concepts presented in the X.700 series should be

  included for telecommunications management networks.

  The references R1, R2 ... Rn represent resources of the network. These resources can be hardware resources, such as switches in particular, or software resources. Taken together, they form the RT telecommunications network which is managed by the management network referenced RGT. The references MO, to MOp represent managed objects (or Managed Objects in English). This concept of managed object is defined by ITU-T recommendation X.700 entitled "Management Framework for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) for CCITT applications". According to this recommendation, each managed object forms an abstraction or a view of one or more resources of the telecommunication network, by presenting via an interface (1I to Ip) a set of properties of these resources. Thus, by way of example, the managed object MO, forms a view of the resources referenced R1 and R2 À These managed objects MO, à MOp are "grouped" in a software component

  called agent and referenced A in Figure 1.

  Reference M represents a manager. Generally, managers communicate with agents, in both directions, via a communication protocol of the CMIP type (Common Management Information Protocol), as defined by recommendation X.711 of the ITU-T. The role of managers is to provide the operator of the RT telecommunications network with a set of functions to manage this network. It can be a function of network configuration, performance management or pricing, monitoring, etc. For this, managers communicate with the agents who are,

  them, usually provided by the network provider.

  However, there is a big difference in level between the functions implemented by managers and the views of resources made available by agents. This difference in level generates many

  communications between managers and agents.

  For example, in the event that an operator decides to switch traffic within the telecommunications network for maintenance, the manager responsible for this changeover should communicate a new configuration to 6

  all managed objects affected by this switchover.

  In the same way, the creation of a new communication requires the creation of new connections between the equipments of the network of

  telecommunications, which can be seen as resources to manage.

  This therefore creates a large number of managed objects corresponding to these new connections. The Agent / Manager architecture as known in the state of the art generates as much communication between the agent and the manager as it

there are managed objects to create.

  However, due to the extent of telecommunications networks, telecommunications management networks (TMN) are complex distributed systems and the

  number of managed objects concerned can reach several thousand.

  Consequently, the multiplication of communications between managers and agents is extremely penalizing for the performance of the system. However, since performance is a determining criterion for a telecommunications management system, it can be deduced therefrom that it is essential to limit communications. In addition, numerous studies are being carried out to develop telecommunications management networks towards a distributed software platform such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) which is specified by the OMG (Open Management Group). The OMG is a consortium created by 8 companies in 1989 with the aim of providing an infrastructure for the development of object applications. This kind of platform has many advantages in terms of ease of development and maintenance of the software, but it also has the disadvantage of poorly supporting the multiplication of the number of objects. Thus, many communications between objects will result from this multiplication, implying the collapse of

system performance.

  The purpose of the present invention is to minimize the number of communications necessary between agents and managers to obtain the same

management functions.

  To do this, the invention relates to an agent for a network management system, in particular in accordance with the recommendations of the X.700 series of the ITU-T, this system further comprising at least one manager. This agent comprises a plurality of managed objects associated with resources of the network, each of these managed objects having an interface allowing this or these managers to access the properties contained in the managed objects. The agent also has at least one so-called high-level interface, allowing this or these managers to access

services contained in the agent.

  According to an implementation of the invention, this or these high interfaces

  level are associated with one or more service objects contained in the agent.

  According to an implementation of the invention, the management system can be a telecommunications management network, in particular in accordance with

  ITU-T M3000 series recommendations.

  The invention also relates to a network management system comprising one or more agents according to the invention. The invention and other advantages will become clearer

  in the description which will be given in conjunction with the attached figures.

  Figure 1, already discussed, illustrates the general architecture linking a

  telecommunications network and a telecommunications management network.

  Figure 2 shows an agent according to the present invention.

  In this FIG. 2, the agent A comprises a large number of managed objects MO1 to MOp, which are associated with network elements not shown. Each of these managed objects has an interface (II to Ip) vis-à-vis the outside of the agent (notably to managers) which allows access to the parameters it contains

and possibly modify them.

  Agent A also has one or more high-level interfaces (Hl to Hq), which are also accessible from outside the agent and in particular from

managers.

  In the embodiment presented in this FIG. 2, these interfaces are associated with service objects O1 to Oq contained in agent A. It is also possible that one or more of these service objects has more than one high-level interface, so the number of service objects and

  the number of high-level interfaces are different.

  The high level interfaces H1 to Hq can be described in the same way

  so that the interfaces 1 to Ip associated with the managed objects MO, to MOp.

  In particular, they can be defined in GDMO (Guideline for the Definition of Managed Objects) language as it is itself defined in ITU-T recommendation X.722. Another possibility is to describe these

  interfaces in the Interface Description Language (IDL)

  defined by OMG for CORBA architecture.

  With such an architecture, it is possible for managers (M) to query and obtain information from both managed objects and service objects. An example of functions performed by such service objects may be traffic switching. Thus, the manager who wishes to switch traffic from one route to another, for example to carry out maintenance of this first has two possibilities: The first consists in sending new configurations to the whole

  of the managed objects concerned as is known in the state of the art.

  The second option is to send a single message to these service objects containing the failover configuration. These service objects are responsible for performing the switchover, possibly by communicating with the managed objects, or by communicating directly with

  the resources of the telecommunications network.

  With this second possibility, we therefore performed only one

  communication between agent and manager instead of several thousand.

  Thus, the architecture remains in accordance with the recommendations of the X-700 series of the ITU-T while providing additional functions allowing a

  drastic reduction in communications.

  In the case where the network management system is a telecommunications management network, the architecture according to the invention also remains in accordance with

  ITU-T M.3000 series recommendations.

  Another notable advantage of the invention is that the manager can thus delegate all the fine management of the network to the service objects. In other words, it is not

  managers do not need to have complete knowledge of the telecommunications network since services with high added value can be implemented in agents.

  Also, the development of a manager is greatly facilitated, since the developer will no longer have the interfaces of the objects at his disposal.

  managed, but also high-level interfaces.

Claims (4)

  1) Agent for network management system, in particular in accordance with the recommendations of the ITU-T X.700 series, said system further comprising at least one manager, said agent comprising a plurality of managed objects associated with resources of said network, each of said managed objects having an interface allowing said at least one manager to access the properties contained in said managed objects, and said agent also having at least one so-called high-level interface, allowing said at least one manager to access services contained in said agent.   2) Agent according to claim 1, characterized in that said at least one high-level interface is associated with one or more service objects   contained in said agent, implementing said services.   3) Agent according to one of the preceding claims, characterized in that   that said management system is a telecommunications management network,   in particular in accordance with the recommendations of the ITU-T M.3000 series.   4) Network management system comprising one or more agents   according to the preceding claims.