A method of gathering end-to-end management information

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network management is an urgent issue for the fast and successful proliferation of ATM networks. Especially, performance management of ATM virtual connections is urgently required because a different quality of service should be guaranteed on each connection. In most cases, the customer's virtual connections traverse multiple subnetworks, therefore, performance information related to specific user connection is distributed in the networks. This makes performance management of ATM network more difficult. In order to obtain this distributed performance information with current ATM-related management information bases (MIBs), interactions among managers and frequent polling of switches are inevitable. This frequent polling and manager to manager interactions may cause management traffic and data retrieval time to increase. In this article, we propose a performance management method using OAM MIB. The MIB is a set of managed objects which have the information provided by OAM (Operation Administration and Maintenance) cells. The basic concept and structure of the MIB are similar to the RMON MIB. By using the OAM MIB, management traffic and manager to manager interactions are much reduced. In our model, customer network management system (NMS) accesses the MIB via M1/M2 reference points of the ATM Forum management architecture with simple network management protocol (SNMP).