Network Management for the 90s

The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of modern networks has pushed industry and research towards a single and consistent way of managing networks. The effort to define a single industry-standard API for network management basically failed because it did not address aspects like complexity and ease of programming. Recently, a common approach is to map established network management standards into another object model, often based on the emerging Corba standard. Unfortunately even this approach has shown many drawbacks related primarily to the significant amount of code that has to be linked with the final application and to the many limitations and imperfections of the mapping itself. This paper describes a new approach to inter-domain management that attempts to overcome the limitations of current solutions. The goal is to allow people to write hybrid CMIP and SNMP-based network management applications using a single and simple object model. Relevant characteristics of this approach are that it is light, extensible, object-oriented, language-neutral, built upon software-components, string-syntax based and Internet-ready. This demonstrates that it is feasible to implement simple and light applications for inter-domain management without the need for expensive or complex technologies.