Towards self-configuring networks

Over the last years the complexity of mobile communication networks has significantly increased. Therefore, Self-Organizing Network (SON) features have been introduced to automate the process of fault-remedying, configuring Network Elements (NEs), and optimizing their operation. Such features are typically implemented by SON functions which actively perform changes to Configuration Management (CM) parameters in order to achieve certain objectives. However, having such features also requires a mechanism that allows us to verify their actions. In case certain NEs experience an undesired behavior, we have to be able to determine whether it is caused by CM changes and, if so, identify the responsible ones for that to happen. In this paper we propose a novel CM change performance assessment method with dynamic scope management for automated CM undo decision making. Our method includes two key properties: the ability to determine the minimal set of cells that are possibly influenced by a certain CM change, and generate a recommendation to accept or reject it based on the observed network performance. Results from our real data evaluation show our method is able to detect anomalous network behavior and identify the responsible changes.

Element Management System (EMS) is a system to manage network element (NE) for Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON). This allows the user to manage all the features of each network element (NE) individually. Network element (NE) exposes one or more management interfaces that the EMS uses to communicate with and to manage them. EMS has been design to fulfill FCAPS criteria which consist of fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security management. EPON is an emerging access network technology that provides a low-cost method of deploying optical access lines between a carrier’s central office and a customer site. EPON build on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standard G.983 for asynchronous transfer mode PON (APON) and seek to bring to life the dream of a full-services access network (FSAN) that delivers converged data, video, and voice over a single optical access system.

Operation support system (OSS) operates on 24times7 basis managing fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security operations from various network elements in a VoIP network. In traditional telephony systems there was a single point of connection from the OSS to the switch. Today VoIP networks are multi-vendor based distributed systems handling voice, data and multimedia content with multiple network elements and element management systems. Service providers expect a carrier grade quality system with single interface from OSS and a transparent flow through configuration management and provisioning system in VoIP networks. The challenge to network vendors and OSS service providers is to provide and end-to-end intelligent flow-through provisioning system across the various network elements and management systems. This paper describes practical tested architecture principles, design and emerging trends of flow-through provisioning system that is scalable and secure to serve millions of customers in a VoIP network

The article discusses the basic principles of configuration management of electrical networks, aimed at ensuring the reliability, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their operation. The relevance of an adaptive approach to network management in the conditions of increasing integration of distributed energy sources (DES) and variable electricity consumption schedules is substantiated. The main aspects of forming an optimal network structure to minimize power losses, improve the quality of power supply and ensure the system's resistance to external and internal influences are outlined. Attention is paid to key tasks related to the implementation of these principles, in particular, determining optimal load distribution points, disaster recovery algorithms, and automation of control processes. Modern approaches to network modeling and their implementation in the practice of energy companies are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the need for coordination between network elements and active participation of consumers in optimization processes. The main effect of using a decentralized sectioning system is considered, i.e. automatic selective disconnection and localization of the damaged area, and automatic restoration of power supply to undamaged consumers.

This paper addresses the management of photonic networks. It presents the first achievements of the ACTS-MEPHISTO project. The project's general objective is to extend the principles of network management (TMN) to generic all-optical networks, in which wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) will be implemented far transmission and routing. This includes the development of information models for optical networks and network elements, of management applications and test platforms to demonstrate fault, configuration and performance management of optical networks, and the promotion of the developed models within ACTS and standardisation bodies. The functional architecture and early information models for the management of optical networks and network elements are described.

This paper proposes the customizable wireless management system (CWMS) to manage heterogeneous broadband wireless access (BWA) networks consisting of multi-vendor WiFi and WiMAX network elements (NEs) with different capabilities. The full customization can be realized by using a multiple-NEType (MNE) generator and metadata which defines characteristics of different NEs. The CWMS MNE-enabled platform provides different core management functionalities with configuration, fault and performance management, while advanced wireless management applications such as wireless link management, RF monitoring and analysis, can be incorporated.

Enterprise Linux environments continue to expand in scale and heterogeneity, increasing the complexity of maintaining consistent patch levels and configuration compliance across thousands of systems. Although centralized lifecycle management platforms such as Red Hat Satellite provide foundational capabilities for system provisioning, patching, and configuration management, they lack an explicit governance model that enforces policy-driven compliance at enterprise scale. This paper presents a policy-driven architecture for enterprise patch and configuration governance built on Red Hat Satellite. The proposed architecture introduces a formal governance layer that defines compliance policies, enforcement rules, and remediation workflows independent of underlying operational tooling. Patch and configuration states are continuously evaluated against defined policies, enabling automated enforcement, exception handling, and compliance reporting. The architecture integrates Red Hat Satellite with automation frameworks to establish closed-loop governance across system lifecycle operations. A controlled experimental evaluation using a representative enterprise-scale Linux environment demonstrates improvements in compliance consistency, reduction in configuration drift, and faster convergence to desired system states compared to traditional operational approaches. The results indicate that separating governance logic from operational tooling provides a scalable and reproducible approach to enterprise patch and configuration management.

The electric power transmission network management is changing from decentralized to province-centralized mode to adapt to the development trend of power grid. For the current hierarchical management situation of transmission system, the paper mainly studies the centralized mode. Considering the difficulty of transform, security, the demand of bandwidth and augmentability factors, the paper proposes a hierarchical province-centralized mode based on Resource pool and states its architecture, realization methods and deployment mode of Network Manager System in Cloud, realizing the unified management, configuration and data sharing of the whole province. Deploying the network management system in the Clout is taking full use of the resource sharing, efficient management and on-demand resource of the Cloud to realize the intensification, promoting the scheduling intensive management level of Information and transmission. Introduction For a long time, the layered, graded, zoned management mode of electric power communication networks makes the network management system built and maintained by the way of multi-level scheduling mechanism. In order to fulfill the development trend of power grid, power transmission network management should be developed from the provinces and cities separated pattern to the province-centralized mode to realize unified management, unified configuration and sharing of the communication network data within province and achieve the purpose of concentrate and highly active management, reasonable resource-configuration and optimizing the structure of the network resources. Deploying the communication network management centrally is an effective way to enhance the level of intensive management, which, whereas, will cause the load that systems deal with increase sharply. However, Cloud computing technology integrates resources into form Cloud in order to get higher utilization of computing and storage, having a strong computing power and storage capacity. With the development of Cloud construction, deploying communication network management in the pool can improve data reliability and security. This paper puts forward a hierarchical province-centralized mode based on Cloud by researching on concentrated-model of Transmission Network Management, and describes the model in detail. Discussed Problems Power system communication network is the important technology support and infrastructure platform of the grid. As an important guarantee of power grid security, stability and economic running, communication network management system is the important technology means of the communication network management and maintenance. International Power, Electronics and Materials Engineering Conference (IPEMEC 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 596 Communication network management system At present, the general transmission network management system is divided into Element Management System(EMS), Subnet Management System(SNMS) and Network Management (NMS) in terms of the management level. EMS is based on the device manager and realizes the management of safety, configuration, performance and alarm for specific equipment; SNMS can divide the network elements into various subnets, not only manage the elements equipments but also the topological relation between them. NMS is a higher level than the SNMS and manage multiple SNMS systems at the same time through network. It configures the router for each business level, and also shows the network elements’ circumstances of each time slot and the business relationships at all levels in details. The relationship of different level network management system is showed as the figure 1.

Building applications and information systems increasingly means dealing with concurrency and faults stemming from distribution of system components. Atomic transactions are a well-known method for transferring the responsibility for handling concurrency and faults from developers to the software's execution environment, but incur considerable execution overhead. This dissertation investigates methods that shift some of the burden of concurrency control into the network layer, to reduce response times and increase throughput. It anticipates future programmable network devices, enabling customized high-performance network protocols.\nWe propose Atomic Transfer (AT), a distributed algorithm to prevent race conditions due to messages crossing on a path of network switches. Switches check request messages for conflicts with response messages traveling in the opposite direction. Conflicting requests are dropped, obviating the request's receiving host from detecting and handling the conflict. AT is designed to perform well under high data contention, as concurrency control effort is balanced across a network instead of being handled by the contended endpoint hosts themselves.\nWe use AT as the basis for a new optimistic transactional cache consistency algorithm, supporting execution of atomic applications caching shared data. We then present a scalable refinement, allowing hierarchical consistent caches with predictable performance despite high data update rates.\nWe give detailed I/O Automata models of our algorithms along with correctness proofs. We begin with a simplified model, assuming static network paths and no message loss, and then refine it to support dynamic network paths and safe handling of message loss.\nWe present a trie-based data structure for accelerating conflict-checking on switches, with benchmarks suggesting the feasibility of our approach from a performance stand-point.

Besides providing network management to the Internet, it has become essential to offer different Quality of Service (QoS) to users. Policy-based management provides control on network routers to achieve this goal. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed a two-tier architecture whose implementation is based on the Common Open Policy Service (COPS) protocol and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). However, there are several limitations to this design such as scalability and cross-vendor hardware compatibility. To address these issues, we present a functionally enhanced multi-tier policy management architecture design in this paper. Several extensions are introduced thereby adding flexibility and scalability. In particular, an intermediate entity between the policy server and policy rule database called the Policy Enforcement Agent (PEA) is introduced. By keeping internal data in a common format, using a standard protocol, and by interpreting and translating request and decision messages from multi-vendor hardware, this agent allows a dynamic Unified Information Model throughout the architecture. We have tailor-made this unique information system to save policy rules in the directory server and allow executions of policy rules with dynamic addition of new equipment during run-time.

Deterministic execution of a multithreaded application guarantees the same output as long as the application runs with the same input parameters. Determinism helps a programmer to test and debug an application and to provide fault-tolerance in the systems based on replicas. Additionally, Transactional Memory (TM) greatly simplifies development of multithreaded applications where applications use transactions (instead of locks) as a concurrency control mechanism to synchronize accesses to shared memory. However, deterministic systems proposed so far are not TM-aware. They violate the main properties of TM (atomicity, consistency and isolation of transactions), and execute TM applications incorrectly. In this paper, we present DeTrans, a runtime system for deterministic execution of multithreaded TM applications. DeTrans executes TM applications deterministically, it executes nontransactional code serially in round-robin order, and transactional code in parallel. Also, we show how DeTrans works with both eager and lazy software TM. We compare DeTrans with Dthreads, a state-of-the-art deterministic execution system. Unlike Dthreads, DeTrans does not use memory protection hardware nor facilities of the underlying operating system (OS) to execute multithreaded applications deterministically. DeTrans uses properties of software TM to ensure deterministic execution. We evaluate DeTrans using the STAMP benchmark suite and we compare DeTrans and Dthreads performance costs. DeTrans incurs less overhead because threads execute in the same address space without any OS system calls overhead. According to our results, DeTrans is 3.99x, 3.39x, 2.44x faster on average than Dthreads for 2, 4 and 8 threads, respectively.

YAP is a protocol designed to efficiently and robustly relay network configuration states of nodes to a designated node that collects and stores the configuration states of all the nodes. Once the configuration states from the nodes are collected, any application can query the information to perform its own specific function. For example, a GUI application can query the database to display the logical topology of the networks. Also a Configuration Manager can query the database to decide how to reconfigure the network. We describe how YAP was integrated with protocols designed to auto-configure IP-related attributes of nodes (using DRCP and DCDP).

The problem of monitoring and characterizing network traffic arises in the context of a variety of network management functions. For example, consider the five functions defined in the OSI Network Management Framework [20.1], i.e., configuration management, performance management, fault management, accounting management and security management. Traffic monitoring is used in configuration management for tasks such as estimating the traffic demands between different points in the network, so that network capacity can be allocated to these demands. In performance management, traffic monitoring can be used to determine whether the measured traffic levels exceed the allocated network capacity, thus causing congestion or delays. When a fault occurs in the network, traffic monitoring is used in fault management to help locate the source of the fault, based on changes in the traffic levels through the surrounding network elements. In accounting management, traffic monitoring is needed to measure the network usage by each customer, so that costs can be charged accordingly in terms of the volume and type of traffic generated. Finally, network traffic monitoring can be used in security management to identify unusual traffic flows, which may be caused by a denial-of-service attack or other forms of misuse.

Automatic Configuration Management CM parameter change assessment, the so-called Self-Organizing Network SON verification, is an important enabler for stable and high-quality modern SONs. However, it also presents a new set of challenges. While improving network stability and resolving unexpected conflicts caused by parallel configuration changes, the SON verification can also make the network optimization less dynamic. This flexibility can be desirable, especially when the network is in an unstable state. One such example is Network Element NE commissioning, after which it may be preferable for the SON functions to explore the configuration space more freely in order to find the optimal configuration. On the other hand, at some point in time, the NE has to converge to a stable configuration. To address these challenges, we introduce in this paper the concept of Network Element Virtual Temperature NEVT, which indicates the state of stability of a NE, and propose how it can be utilized to optimize the verification process. This approach is evaluated in a simulated environment and compared to other verification mechanisms. The results show that the proposed method allows the network to better react to changes without sacrificing on its stability.

2.8 - Internet Management Protocols