The CORBA-based unified event management framework in multi-layer networks

Abstract

An efficient integrated event management is a great concern to a telecommunications industry. An integrated event management across multi-layer networks is much more complex than that across a specific layer network. Although there are several event management frameworks [Ericsson Research Canada March (2000); Integrated Network Management — Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (1995) 290–301; Integrated Network Management — Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (1995) 278–289], each of them is designed to apply only a specific single layer network. The frameworks are the cause of a lack of scalability and of the difficulties of integrated event management of multi-layer networks. On the other hand, CORBA Notification Service (NS) [OMG, CORBA Services: Common Object Service Specification March (1995); OMG, The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification July (1995)] is a promising event propagation platform to build an integrated event management for multi-layer networks, but its performance is not sufficient for bulk events in such networks. This paper proposes the unified event management framework that can uniformly be applicable to multi-layer networks of ATM, Frame Relay (FR) and IP without any customization or modification. In order to define such a framework, this paper proposes a common network model and an event information model that is commonly applicable to the multi-layer networks, which identifies the meaning and relationship of information manipulated by the framework. This paper also suggests an event queue management scheme to improve the insufficient performance of CORBA NS stemmed mainly from its persistency property. Replacing this with the proposed queue management scheme and comparing the event management performance of the framework with that of CORBA NS, this paper will show that former gives a much higher event propagation performance than that of the latter.