Putting it all together: Properties of Q-Adapter Functions; IIMC Proxy Management Model

 

Q-adapter functions allowing the management of SNMP agents from a TMN-compliant managing system must fulfill the following requirements:

1.

The agent's SNMP-MIBs have to be represented in the manager's information model (OSI SMI).

2.

No modifications are to be applied to managing or to managed systems, i.e. a completely transparent transition between the architectures for all entities must be achieved. The Q-adapter function therefore has the duty of providing TMN-compliant proxy objects for any SNMP agent in the domain surveyed by the QAF.

3.

Operations issued by the OSF (Create, Delete, Get, Set) have to be interpreted by the QAF and forwarded to the corresponding agent. On the other hand, SNMP traps issued by the agents have to be transformed into CMIP notifications and then forwarded to the OSF.

One may wonder why the mapping of only two models (namely the information and communication models) is sufficient for our purposes and why it is not necessary to provide a transition between the organizational and functional models also defined in [14]. The reason is that the former model is roughly identical for both architectures; the latter, in contrast, defines a broad range of management functionality for the OSI/TMN domain and has no counterpart in SNMP management.

The goal is to deliver the strengths of the OSI/TMN architecture to the Internet management architecture in order to obtain a comprehensive integrated management solution. This implies that the Internet architecture (having no notion of management functionality) can be used with management services already defined in the OSI/TMN management framework. A typical example for this is the enhancement of the Internet management architecture with management functionality like threshold monitoring or event processing defined by the OSI Systems Management Functions.