A fuzzy management information base (FMIB) for network management

Network management becomes very complicated as networks grow in size, complexity and heterogeneity. As a result, network management becomes a key issue for any enterprise. A management information base is a repository of all managed objects being used for management purposes. Most existing network management platforms consider the network information infrastructure as a deterministic concept and deliberately ignore any vagueness, incompleteness and uncertainty of information. This is a major issue which should be addressed, and the next generation of network management platforms needs to address this nondeterministic behaviour, vagueness, incompleteness and uncertainty of information. This paper introduces the notion of fuzzy managed objects (FMOs), which are managed objects with fuzzy values for their attributes. The repository of all FMOs is called a fuzzy management information base (FMIB)