New Design Schemes for Lightweight TMN Mediation Device/Q3 Adapter

This paper describes new design schemes of telecommunication network management (TMN) agent for man machine language (MML)-managed network elements (NEs), especially for ATM networks. Most of currently developed ATM switches have simple MML interfaces for local operator crafts. This means that most operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) functions reside within the NE itself, and designing TMN agent as a proxy is considered to be most appropriate in that more intelligent event correlation and filtering can be done in NE itself. In TMN environment, proxy based management expects an agent to have a functionality of Q adaptation function (QAF), rather than network element function (NEF) itself. In contrast with NEF, QAF can be simplified by focusing on the message conversion, namely adaptation and mediation, between standard CMIP message and proprietary MML message or any kind of management message. Based on the observed fact above, this paper proposes several design schemes for Q3 agent and its companion gateway function, so that a Q3 agent, as a proxy, can rather be lightweight and mediation insensitive. The design schemes proposed in this paper are listed in the following: designing management protocol insensitive schema for NE-embedded database (DB), mapping of management information base (MIB)/management instances tree (MIT) accesses to DB queries and making direct use of DB queries, minimizing the retained information on MIT/MIB, and using an GDMO/ASN.1 based MML mediation capabilities with various message adaptation capabilities.