A flexible management gateway for ATM-based networks

Network management is an important issue, especially for new and even
complex network technologies such as ATM. At each time, state and
operation of all components in the network should be controlled by the
network management in order to have a global overview concentrated at
one point and to react directly on detected problems. Unfortunately, the
management interfaces of current ATM components are very different due
to the ongoing standardization and vendor-specific issues. In this
paper, we present the ATM Management Gateway (AMG) which can be
classified as a proxy management agent. This gateway realizes a
well-defined management interface for an ATM component, at which a
minimal set of useful management information is provided. In order to
adapt the gateway to the interface characteristics of given ATM
components, it can be configured very flexible how to obtain the
required information (e.g., which protocol has to be used and how
information is identified). Moreover, this paper presents a
hierarchical architecture for the management of ATM networks which
consists of the three levels element management, management middleware,
and management applications. ... mehrThe AMG entity represents a main component
of the element management and the realized well-defined management
interface builds the basis for the whole architecture. Finally, this
paper describes how the implemented AMG entity has been successfully
evaluated in an ATM testbed.