Telecommunications Network Management into the 21st Century: Techniques, Standards, Technologies, and Applications / Edition 1

by Salah Aidarous, Thomas Plevyak

Overview

A leading-edge reference, this collection of original chapters from prominent experts in the field brings you a superb presentation of the latest in telecommunications network management. Thorough and up-to date, Telecommunications Network Management into the 21st Century covers the timely application of forward-looking network management techniques, which is the key to fully realizing future industry capabilities. Topics covered include principles of network management, network management protocol standards, domestic and international OSI management standards, and more!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780780310131
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	03/10/1995
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.33(h) x 1.15(d)

About the Author

Dr. SALAH AIDAROUS worked in the Network Management Division of NEC America on the planning and development of integrated network management systems. Prior to his association with NEC, he was with Nortel Technology, working on a broad range of assignments in telecommunications networks and services planning and development.

THOMAS PLEVYAK is Editor in Chief of IEEE Communications magazine and a past president and director of publications of the IEEE Communications Society. An IEEE Fellow, he is currently employed at Verizon Communications in Arlington, Virginia, in the field of operations and network management standards.

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Telecommunications Network Management into the 21st Century

Techniques, Standards, Technologies, and Applications

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John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-7803-1013-6

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Chapter One

Principles of Network Management

Salah Aidarous Thomas Plevyak NEC America Bell Atlantic Irving, TX 75038 Arlington, VA 22201

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Telecommunications networks have become essential to the day-to-day activities of the enterprise and individuals. Many corporations, agencies, universities, and other institutions now rely on voice, data (e.g., facsimile transmission, electronic funds transfer), and video (e.g., video teleconferencing) services to ensure their growth and survival. This trend will accelerate as personal communications services (PCS), LAN-to-LAN interconnectivity, image file transfer, and other innovative services are developed and are standardized throughout the operation of the enterprise.

In parallel with rapid advances and increased reliance on telecommunications services, network technologies continue to evolve. For example, transport technologies, such as the synchronous optical network (SONET), will support asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and frame relay to deliver broadband services at both constant and variable bitrates. Innovative access technologies are emerging to accommodate customer-premises equipment access to higher bandwidth services and an expanding range of mobility services (e.g., PCS), and to provide seamless access to fiber optic and satellite networks. In addition, the advanced switching technologies required for ATM technology and switched multi-megabit digital service (SMDS) are now being deployed.

Network management is one of the most important yet confusing topics in telecommunications today. It includes operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) functions required to provide, monitor, interpret, and control the network and the services it carries. These OAM&P functions provide operating telephone companies (OTCs) and their corporate customers and end-users with efficient means to manage their resources and services to achieve objectives. There have been different approaches and strategies taken by OTCs, equipment vendors, and users to manage their networks and equipment. Management solutions are often specific to each vendor's networking product environment.

Traditionally, the public network was designed to handle voice and data services using both analog and digital technologies. Network management methods were introduced according to each technology and service. The outcome was multiple overlays of circuit-switched, packet-switched, and slow-switched connectivity nodes. Private networks, on the other hand, were built to provide enterprise information networking using PBXs, mainframes, terminals, concentrators, and bridges. The public network was used to provide the wide area backbone network. From an OAM&P perspective, interoperability between these networks has been a major challenge for the telecommunications and computing industries.

Figure 1-1 shows a typical enterprise network that includes both the private corporate data network (usually managed by the corporate telecommunications group) and the public part of the corporate network which is usually managed by the OTC and the interexchange carrier (IEC). PBXs may also be owned and managed by the OTC. The network may carry different services that require different management methods and may cross jurisdictional boundaries involving different management organizations.

As the pace of technological development quickens, new products are brought to market even faster and support of several generations of equipment and software is required. The current network environment is complex, diverse, competitive, and characterized by different service subnetworks, multiple overlays, and multiple media. These factors have increased the cost of network management (e.g., operations costs are exceeding capital costs) making it the primary concern of many corporations, OTCs, equipment suppliers, and standards organizations.

This chapter addresses overall principles of network management. In that sense, it is an overview, not intended as introductory material to other chapters. Instead, Chapters 2 and 3 are tutorial and introductory. This book focuses on telecommunications OAM&P and network management. Data network management is treated where relationships overlap, but this area is not a central focus.

1.2 DRIVERS FOR NETWORK MANAGEMENT

In today's dynamic telecommunications environment, changes are occurring on many fronts. Services and network technologies are advancing rapidly, competition among service providers is intensifying, and customer demand for network access and customized services is increasing. A fundamental means of achieving these desirable changes is through an evolution of existing network management architectures.

Services Evolution: Network end-users are employing a spectrum of increasingly "complex" services that range from low-speed, bursty services to high-speed, continuous services and to high-bandwidth pay-per-view video. Conversely, large- and medium-business customers desire simpler, cheaper, yet even higher bandwidth services to link LANs for video conferencing and to enable effective information networking and distributed computing. They also want the consolidation of data, voice, image, and video traffic on their enterprise networks. New services are being developed at an ever-quickening pace. For example, virtual private network services are provided as an alternative to dedicated facilities. Personal communications services will provide the subscriber accessibility to his or her telephone services as well as reachability through a single telephone number.

Technology Evolution: Network technology is undergoing consolidation. For example, integrated circuit, frame, and packet switches, capable of carrying all services, is achievable with current technology. Coupling narrowband ISDN (basic and primary rate) and broadband ISDN provides a consolidated set of access technologies. On the other hand, SONET transport systems will provide a consistent digital core network. This is augmented on the private network side by integrated PBX technologies, LANs that carry all services, and use of high bandwidth services to consolidate wide area traffic. Network technology evolution is exploiting recent advances in distributed systems technology [open software foundation (OSF), distributed computing environment/distributed management environment (DCE/DME), telecommunications management network (TMN), telecommunications information networking architecture/ information networking architecture (TINA/INA)], internet technology [extended internet protocol (IP), simple network management protocol (SNMP)], database driven services systems [advanced intelligent network (AIN)], and radio access systems.

Customer Requirements: Business customers are pushing for bandwidth- and service-on-demand with electronic interfaces to the network for requesting services or changes, reporting troubles, billing, and making payments. They want provisioning times in the order of minutes and services that do not fail. Residential customers and corporate network end-users want to set up basic or enhanced services such as call management or custom local area signaling system (CLASS), when and where they want them, through a simple, one-step process.

Competitiveness: The competitive landscape is changing for network/ service providers. Business pressures are forcing many service providers to find ways to reduce operations costs, use resources more efficiently, streamline the implementation of new services and technologies, and identify new revenue-generating opportunities. Private network operators wish to use their networks as strategic elements in their own business areas but are being forced to reduce overhead wherever possible. These pressures will increase in the future.

Considering the rapid deployment of new services and technologies, escalating competitive pressures, and the broadening demands of customers, service providers face an immediate and pressing need to streamline, simplify, and automate network management operations.

1.3 TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO NETWORK MANAGEMENT

Today's telecommunications networks (see Fig. 1-2) are characterized by a tight coupling of specific services to specific network resources, typically deployed in a series of multiple overlays; multiple OAM&P networks and operation systems for each of these service and resource overlays; and organizational structures made up of separate groups performing similar functions. This duplication of overlay structures was related to the operational characteristics of older technologies. In addition, specific vendor elements had their own proprietary approaches to OAM&P and network management created multiple administrative domains with poor interoperability between them. The total was the sum of all these independent, resource consuming partial solutions that have contributed to a network management environment that is inefficient, complex, and expensive to administer.

Traditional network management practices deal with a wide array of procedures, processes, and tools for configuration, fault detection, performance monitoring, security, accounting, and other management functions and are based on a "master-slave" relationship between management or operations systems (OSs) and network elements (NEs). Network elements typically have had only basic operations functionality with little ability to control activities or make decisions beyond the scope of call processing and information transmission. Accordingly, operations systems perform the bulk of the OAM&P work-processing raw data provided by individual network elements, making decisions, and instructing each individual network element to undertake specific actions.

This master-slave relationship contributes to operating inefficiencies in a number of ways. For example, there is little sharing of logical resources, such as data, because network elements and operations systems have been designed independently. In addition, each vendor's equipment has unique configuration and fault management interfaces as well as specific performance requirements. Network management systems must characterize each network element and vendor's interfaces on an individual basis, adding considerable time and complexity in introducing new services or technologies.

Other factors have compounded this complexity. For example, network management systems were generally constructed to optimize the work of individual service provider organizations or work groups at a particular point in time for a particular suite of technology. This type of development was undertaken independently by each organization and little attention was paid to system level interworking. Many copies of data, each tied to specific systems or job functions and to specific equipment vintages or implementations, were incorporated throughout the network, creating a major data synchronization problem. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for the service provider, as a whole, to evolve services, network technologies, and network management processes in a cost-effective, timely, competitive manner in response to rapid changes in the telecommunications business.

1.4 REQUIREMENTS FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY NETWORK MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE

In developing an evolutionary network management architecture that will overcome the inefficiency, costliness, and complexity of the existing environment, it is essential to address key service, technical, and business aspects.

Service aspects include:

enabling rapid new service deployment within both the network and network management system environments and

promoting faster service activation.

Management or operations systems must be flexible and have a distributed, modular architecture that allows service providers to adapt to future customer needs. These needs may include, for example, rapid service deployment and activation, enhanced billing, and end-user online feature access. New software and features should ensure that customer services can be added in minutes rather than days or weeks.

Technology aspects include:

the challenge of efficiently managing and distributing data throughout the network and

elimination of physical overlay networks currently required for service/resource deployment and associated management systems.

Data management represents a major cost item for service providers due to the volume, redundancy, and difficulty in ensuring accuracy throughout a network/service provider's operation. Therefore, evolutionary architecture should allow for distribution of data throughout all layers of the network management environment and provide for intelligent network elements that can process data and pass information to network management systems on a peer-to-peer basis. Manual administration and alignment of redundant databases should be eliminated.

Given the sophistication and rapid growth of services, a more flexible operations environment must be established (i.e., multiple, single-function overlay networks must be eliminated). A distributed operations environment that correctly uses the capabilities of all components will remove the current interoperability bottleneck resulting from the proliferation of overlay networks.

An important step in creating this flexibility is to eliminate discrete overlay networks, by introducing network technology capable of providing generic resource capacity. This capacity will be logically assigned to a broad range of service types (i.e., the network will be provisioned in bulk and the services will be logically assigned to the network resources). Furthermore, incorporating intelligent network elements in the evolving operations architecture and repartitioning operations functions between network elements and network management systems will add momentum to the process of decoupling network management from service- and vendor-specific implementations. Successful achievement of this objective will be dependent upon utilization of standard open interfaces (covered in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3).

Business aspects include:

reducing operations costs,

enhancing the flexibility of the OAM&P environment, and

providing services in a competitive, timely manner.

Cost reduction can be addressed on a number of fronts. One means is through simplifying the network, i.e., replacing service and technology-specific resources with generic resources capable of carrying a wide range of services. For example, replacing plesiosynchronous transport with SONET technology will reduce the need to manage multiplexors. In the access domain, software-controlled service-adaptive access technologies (e.g., those that enable service characteristics to be electronically downloaded to the network element) will simplify the network further and reduce the frequency and complexity of personnel dispatches. Another means of reducing cost is by integrating and simplifying operations processes and functions. Cost/benefit can also be achieved through elimination of redundant databases and amalgamation of processes and work forces so that these align with the network/service provider's business objectives. In addition to streamlining functions and costs, another benefit is an improvement in service responsiveness and quality. This could be achieved by providing near real-time service provisioning, automatic service restoral in the event of network disruption, and just-in-time resource provisioning.

An important means of enhancing OAM&P flexibility is to incorporate more intelligence into network elements. This redistribution of management functionality will enable network management systems to maintain a high-level, end-to-end view of services and resources (as opposed to the current scenario in which management systems must understand the implementation details of each individual network element's technology).

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Table of Contents

Introduction.

Acknowledgments.

List of Acronyms.

Principles of Network Management (Salah Aidarous and Thomas Plevyak).

A Critical Survey of Network Management Protocol Standards(Yechiam Yemini).

Telecommunications Management Network: Principles, Models, and Applications (Veli Sahin).

Domestic and International Open Systems InterconnectionManagement Standards (Philip A. Johnson).

Applying Object-Oriented Analysis and Design to the Integrations of Network Management Systems (Raymond H. Pyle).

Modeling and Simulation in Network Management (Victor S. Frost).

Knowledge-based Network Management (Kurudi H. Muralidhar).

Configuration Management (Gordon Rainey).

Fault Management (Charles J. Byrne).

Network Performance Management (Subhabrata Bapi Sen).

Distributed Restoration of the Transport Network (Wayne Grover).

Index.