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Network Management – An introduction
What is network management?
Every network of equipments requires its management. Example of these networks varies from telecom infrastructure to power-grids. A simple example is set of laser printers installed in a office facility, connected through LAN. In this example each printer might have following requirements:
- The printer shall notify to a central support system whenever its services go down due to paper-jam, low toner, or any other fault.
- The printer shall provide an interface to central support system to remotely configure its parameters like colour or B/W print, resolution, etc.
- The printer shall provide usage data to central support system that can be used to account number of pages printed by each user.
- The printer shall facilitate central support system to generate reports on total print outs taken during the day / week / month.
- The printer shall facilitate a restricted access for its use, based on user credentials.
These features of a LAN printer facilitate its remote management. Like this printer any equipment may require remote management.
Telecom focus
I have taken example of a printer because one can easily relate with this set of requirements irrespective of his/her exposure to telecommunications. However, for the rest of the text we will restrict the scope within telecommunications domain.
Access network of a GSM infrastructure consists of BTS, BSC, and MSC. Network of these telecom equipments also requires remote management to facilitate various functions like alarm monitoring, provisioning, managing call records, performance reports and enforcing authorized access. These network equipments are referred as network elements (NE) in context of network managements.
Managers and agents
Network management is facilitated through manager-agent architecture. Each network element which is required to be individually managed carries an agent software. The agent is responsible for following functions:
- Send notification messages to remote manager whenever a fault occurs or state of the NE changes
- Receives configuration parameters from its remote manager and applies that on the NE
- Maintain value of the parameters / statistics that its remote manage might require to be fetched.
- Authenticate the remote manager before receiving or sending the data.
Manager interfaces with various agents facilitate operators to efficiently manage all resources in a network. Typically, a manager has two interfaces, namely south-bound interface and north-bound interface. South-bound interface refers to its connectivity with NEs. North-bound interface refer to its interface with a manager of manager, which manages the network at a different level of abstraction. In addition to these two interfaces, a manager also provides a user-interface that an operator can use to configure and monitor the network elements.
FCAPS
FCAPS refer to basic set of functionality required from an NM solution. FCAPS stands for:
F – Fault Management
C – Configuration Management
A – Accounting
P – Performance Management
S – Security Management
Fault management refers to listening notifications from NEs and identifying them as alarms / events. Configuration management refers to remotely configuring parameters of an NE. Accounting refers to collecting usage related data that can be used for invoicing network users. Performance management refers to collecting statistics data which can be utilized to derive information for network load, network utilization, its latency, etc. Security management refers to the various mechanisms that an NM solution uses to authenticate and authorize managed NEs and its users, and security of the data exchanged with them.
NM Protocols
Various protocols that are used for communication between manager and agents are referred as NM protocols. The popular ones are SNMP, CMIP, TL1 and CORBA. Recent additions to the list are NetConf and SOAP. However, various networks also use their proprietary management protocols based on ASCII messages over TCP/UDP based transport.
Maintainer: Brij Bhushan Ravat
Category: Nm, Wireless
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