A Transactional Approach to Configuring Telecommunications

Services

Tim Kempster

(tdk@dcs.ed.ac.uk)

Changing Environment

• Telecommunications providers now route voice, data, fax and broadband services over wide area IP networks.

• Routers (Network Nodes) are becoming more intelligent and programmable e.g. Intel IXP1200 vs ASIC.

• How do we manage and reconfigure these Networks?

Simple Network Model

MIB

MIB

MIB

MIBMIB

•A Transport Medium (Fiber, satellite, microwave)

•Network Nodes (routers, switches, relays)

Current Management Techniques

• Each Network Node (NN) has a MIB which contains fields that can be read and or written to.

• Currently, SNMP supports GetRequest and SetRequest Methods on fields in the MIB.

Motivation for a Transactional Approach

• A reconfiguration task often requires atomic changes to, and reads form, MIBs at several network nodes.

• When reading several MIB values it is useful to see a consistent view. We should not read the partial updates of other reconfiguration tasks.

The Solution