Application of ODP modelling techniques to SDH network management

Considerable effort has been applied within standards bodies, particularly ITU-TS, toward the modelling of management information in transmission equipment. This work has been motivated by recent pushes for improved performance and interoperability among different vendors´ equipment, and enabled by the transition to the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). To date, this effort has focused on applying an object-oriented model for the specification of transmission equipment characteristics (referred to as “managed objects”). Supporting standards enable network management systems to view transmission equipment in a common way across a standardized interface suite, regardless of manufacturer, as an application of TMN (telecommunication management network) principles. Modelling tools which support this approach make assumptions about the partitioning of management behavior which are representative of existing management practices. In this regard, they adequately address the needs of current management architectures. As these practices evolve to support new and unforeseen services, a demand for even higher levels of management system reliability and performance will emerge. New technology developments will provide distributed architectures to satisfy these demands. The authors report on the results of an empirical experiment to assess the viability of open distributed processing (ODP) concepts in the characterization of the network management behavior. This includes a brief overview of SDH technology and the standardized functional architecture of an SDH network; an informal description of an example of a key network management application, path setup; an application of ODP concepts to refine this specification; and finally, a presentation of their conclusions