A Transactional Approach to Configuring Telecommunications Services

1. A Transactional Approach to ConfiguringTelecommunications Services Tim Kempster (tdk@dcs.ed.ac.uk)

2. 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?

3. MIB MIB MIB MIB MIB Simple Network Model • A Transport Medium (Fiber, satellite, microwave) • Network Nodes (routers, switches, relays)

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. The Solution A Transaction Commit Protocol