Scalable fault management for mobile networks beyond 3G

The development of future releases of third generation and fourth generation cellular network shows a clear indications that today's ATM-based radio access network (RAN) was replaced by an IP-based RAN particularly for reducing the cost compared to today's RANs. Managing an IP-based RAN with SNMP is a challenge, particularly concerning scalability. Already existing solutions for delegating management functions to managed nodes can achieve the required scalability, but they come with a big overhead of resource consumption and complexity. This paper presents a lean solution for health checking of managed nodes that achieves this goal by restricting itself to this purpose. The CHECK MIB module serves for remote configuration of heath check actions to be performed at a managed node and for retrieving health check results. Resource consumption is very low compared to already existing, more general technologies. Health checks can be specified easily by setting a very small number of objects and the implementation of the MIB module is lightweight.