Seamless Network Management in Presence of Heterogeneous Management Protocols for Next Generation Networks

Addition of different service requirements by users and advent of new access networks have increased the complexity to manage these networks uniformly. However, there are many management protocols available today like SNMP, JMX, WBEM, etc, which are being used to manage networks. Because of complexity and heterogeneity of these management protocols it has become very difficult for a network manager to manage different network elements (NE) since these may be instrumented using different such protocols. One critical example of such a complex network is IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). 3GPP does not specify the management protocol to be used to manage network elements in IMS. In this paper, the authors have proposed a novel network management solution, which can be used to manage IMS components independent of heterogeneous management protocols like WBEM, SNMP, JMX etc. Moreover, authors have developed a prototype resource adapter to test the suitability of the protocol.