VPN management
Editors: James Reilly, Richard Lewis
Authors: James Reilly, Konstantina Mourelatou, Panos Georgatsos,
David Griffin, George Mykoniatis, Valia Demestiha, Petri Niska, George Pavlou, Peter Baxendale
This chapter presents an overview of the management and use of two generations of ATM Virtual Private Networks - intermediate and target VPN. The required Management Services are analysed, specified and mapped onto the TMN [6.1] architecture. The architectural components and their operational dependencies and information exchanges are described.
The competitiveness of modern national and multi-national corporations is increasingly affected by how well they utilise telecommunications services. A service being increasingly demanded is called Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs allow the corporate customer to create logical private networks using public network resources. In the future, as the use of more advanced applications and services grows, there will be a need to extend VPN services to integrate many different types of corporate telecommunications traffic including voice, data, video and multi-media. ATM provides a suitable VPN infrastructure offering the high bandwidth and flexibility required by different types of services. ATM technology is becoming an increasingly important part of the Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure and will be used by public network operators to offer advanced telecommunications services such as future VPN services. The provisioning of VPN services will require the deployment of advanced Management Services.
This chapter presents an overview of the management of two distinct types of ATM VPN service. The first service, called intermediate-VPN (iVPN) provides a generic service for provisioning of ATM leased-line VPCs in a multinational, multi-operator environment. Management Services for iVPN were specified, designed, implemented and tested by ICM on simulated and real ATM networks during 1995. The second service, called target-VPN (tVPN), concentrates on using the full statistical multiplexing power of ATM technology required for future ATM VPNs. This terminology is in keeping with previous RACE work in this area [6.5][6.6][6.7].