TMN OS validation and testing via thorough agent emulation

OSI management is becoming a widely adopted standard in the management of telecommunications networks due to its intrinsic openness and flexibility. OSI management applications are structured according to a manager-agent scheme. Agents are software programs associated to network elements with the purpose to turn manager requests into commands issued to the real resources; similarly, agents forward events originated within the real resources to their manager as notifications. The interface between managers and agents is object oriented, specified according to the GDMO standard language. For each management domain a proper information model (e.g. the class hierarchy relevant for the application) is defined. Information between manager and agent is exchanged in the form of operations over objects, as defined by the CMIP application level protocol. MOMIX is a toolkit that allows for the implementation of thorough agent emulators, out of the specification of the information model, written in GDMO/ASN.1. By thorough emulation we distinguish the MOMIX approach from the other toolkits: MOMIX emulators are actually full agent prototypes plus partial real resource simulators. MOMIX provides a highly sophisticated environment based on solid foundations inherited from Intellicorp KAPPA object oriented development environment. MOMIX addresses the task of fast prototyping management applications.