Multi-service networks: A new approach to end-to-end topology management

Abstract

The ability to couple enterprise-wide views of your services, resources, and networks is a cornerstone of multi-service networks. The information repository needed to achieve this task is an important building block in creating a correct view of the capabilities of the network and is therefore crucial for service deployment, activation and management. At the same time, creating and updating the information repository is a very challenging task. Traditional inventory solutions are static in nature and reflect homogenous network architectures, leading to problems of data consistency between the managed domain and the view at the management node. Moreover, today there is no common data model in use, while tabulation of inventory information between different domains is very hard, if not impossible, to obtain using the current solutions, which makes an end-to-end view of the network very hard to achieve. This paper discusses a new approach to inventory, addressing the challenges of building an end-to-end view of the network topology for multi-service networks. We describe Stratus, a flexible unified SOA-based architecture, which addresses the complex issues of dynamic discovery of network domains, automatic end-to-end topology creation, and automatic updates of the topology based on network changes. Our approach is based on the MTOSI recommendations for inventory retrieval. The experimental prototype demonstrated that the proposed solution is technically feasible and compatible with existing inventory solutions for Public Ethernet and Core Wireline Access Networks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.