Management Services for Performance Verification in Broadband Multi-Service Networks
Panos Georgatsos
ALPHA Systems S.A., Athens, Greece
David Griffin
FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece
Abstract
The intelligence provided by network management has been widely recognized as an important aspect of telecommunications networks. The coexistence of different services, with potentially widely differing requirements on performance and quality of service, on the same broadband networking infrastructure, imposes the need for effective management schemes. ATM technology itself provides several degrees of freedom for multiplexing traffic that if not managed properly can prove disastrous in terms of network provisioning and performance.
Performance management has been identified as one of the major management areas by ISO and ITU-T. The aim of the performance management functions is to guarantee that the network meets the required performance targets of the range of services that it supports. The on-going work in performance management related areas (routing, VPC bandwidth management, etc.) justifies the need for efficient network performance management systems.
Taking into account the multi-service environment, network performance should be evaluated and assessed on the basis of measures relating to the individual performance characteristics of the bearer connection types (or classes of service, CoSs) supported by the network. Although there are practical implementations of network monitoring and performance evaluation systems, the problem of network performance assessment from a network management perspective and taking into account the different performance characteristics of the multi-class environment, has not been fully addressed.
This paper presents a practical management system for performance monitoring and network performance verification to support the larger goals of performance management systems. We show how the rich and powerful features of OSI systems management can be used in a hierarchical manner in the TMN, to achieve sophisticated performance monitoring and performance verification without imposing a large communications overhead in the TMN and hence in the managed network itself.
Full paper in in "Bringing Telecommunication Services to the People," proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks, Clarke, Campolargo and Karatzas, editors, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 1995.