This presentation has described a research project dealing with the design and implementation of a Q-adapter function for the integration of existing SNMP resources into a TMN environment. From the perspective of the managing system, these resources appear as OSI/TMN managed objects; therefore, the whole range of OSI/TMN functionality and features may be applied to them. This includes scoping, filtering and synchronization; it is also possible to delegate event handling and logging tasks to the QAF by defining Event Forwarding Discriminators and Log Records. Furthermore, we implemented a first set of managed objects allowing to manage the QAF itself from the OSF: This includes, among other, the setting of resource-specific polling profiles. Although we were able to base our development on a sound fundament (namely the IIMC concepts and the powerful IBM TMN development environment that shields completely the complexity of CMIP), we experienced that the design and implementation of a Q-adapter function for SNMP are far from being trivial:
The compiler based on the IIMC algorithm (described in section 2.1) does a very good translation job but can, at its current stage, only handle SNMPv1 managed object descriptions. The incorrect generation of name bindings and object identifiers (sketched out in section 4.3) requires some additional work.
Our experiences with the IBM TMN development toolset have been described in section 4 and can be summarized as follows: Apart from the large compile times and the considerable code size of the QAF, the experiences with this development environment were good although some deep understanding of OSI SMI is required.
Steps for further research include the enhancement of the QAF in a way that its set of MOCs can be extended during runtime; currently, the QAF needs to be recompiled if a new SNMP MIB is to be added. Another issue is the manageability of the QAF itself; we are working on the definition and implementation of a Q-adapter MIB allowing to lookup and modify the properties of the QAF. The experiences obtained in this project are being successfully reused in a follow-on research project dealing with the integration of SNMP resources in CORBA. This prototype is currently under development.