Introduction

2. Introduction • A central issue in supporting interoperability is achieving type compatibility. Type compatibility allows (a) entities developed by various vendors to be integrated into a user’s system easily, and (b) entities to be run on variety of processors in certain relationships. • The development in technologies and the rapid growth of equipment and networks lead to the urgent requirements of interoperability in Network and Systems Management (NSM). • Management Information Base (MIB) is a collection of data structures that defines network managementinfrastructure, objects, and notifications needed to manage one or more products. • Improving MIB functionality, especially using a database to manage the representations of relationships and knowledge, is an effective approach that provides NSM interoperable support.

3. Overview of Data in NSM [1] Information Aspects • Information model (Object Oriented) • Object libraries • Implementation Communication Aspects • Manager-agent communication • Manager-manager communication Organizational Aspects • Role management • Domain management Processing Aspects • management procedures (algorithms, models, strategies) • Lifetime (versions, life cycles) • Generic system management functions • Documentation Objects of the functional areas configuration, faults,... MIB Knowledge objects Generic support objects MO as an abstraction of resources System services Components Communication Protocol Network/system user Management applications provider

4. The Mechanisms in SNMP’s MIB • MIB describes several aspects which are important to NSM, mainly end systems, intermediate systems, and media systems. • SNMP provides a static hierarchical tree structure to manage MIB. • The tree structure defines the groups of objects into logically related set; the leaf objects are the actual managed objects; • there are two kinds of objects: scalar and conceptual tables with scalar-valued entries; • The MIB can be used for all network management functional requirements as specified in the FCAPS model • MIB can be viewed as the granularity or quantification of networking. From this point of view, it is possible to fulfil interoperable requirements of NSM by considering from MIB functionality.

5. The Deficiencies of Current MIB • The architecture of MIB provides a large degree of flexibility in selecting the number and locations of the management mediators. it is difficult to guarantee the qualities of service in management applications due to the following deficiencies. • Firstly, the MIB structure does not include provisions to represent complex relations among managed entities; only several simple methods can be used to show relationships among objects.

6. The Deficiencies of Current MIB(Cont..) • Secondly, there is no approach available to select (filter) the data retrieved • Thirdly, there is no effective method to express management-related knowledge as well. • In summary, these deficiencies mean the ability to obtain information for making management decisions from MIBs is highly dependent on the understanding of both the SNMP protocol and various individual MIB segmental vocabularies used by the vendors.

7. Solutions • Given the existing problems which obstruct the development of MIB in the area of interoperability, the following solutions have been proposed : • First, Improve notation (and protocols) in order to represent the relationships between managed objects and management requirements. • An alternativeapproach is to use current SNMP framework to (a) identify the relationship among the managed objects, (b) create an explicit manager-agent ``association'’ or MIB groups, and (c) develop an algorithm for analyzing how performance is affected by the managed objects in the relationships formed at step (a). • Improve the database management system used to store managed objects

8. Proposed Management Model

9. Proposed Management Model versus CMIP • Both Internet SNMP-based proposed management model and OSI CMIP provide an open, standard platform to perform interoperable network management in a multi-vendor, heterogeneous environment. They are similar in terms of their functionality and basic approach. • From certain points of view, such as information model, protocol, management philosophy and interoperability, there are some essential differences between CMIP and the suggested model. • Taking into consideration the work that has been undertaken in the research, this paper focuses on the SNMP-based networks and its implementation in small and medium business.

10. Conclusions • This paper investigated the mechanisms in SNMP’s MIB and summarized the deficiencies of such mechanisms. Then, it discusses several approaches to cater for current network management requirements. • Interoperability can be accomplished, in part, through the efficient use of MIBs. Therefore, it is important to address the problems associated to existing MIB mechanisms and implementations. • Since IETF workgroups deal with the evolution of SNMP framework, the research described in this paper focuses on finding out potential relationships among certain managed objects in order to (a) form meta-variables and script MIBs and (b) find a formalization of independent administrative policies for semi-autonomous area managers.