CMIS/P++: extensions to CMIS/P for increased expressiveness and efficiency in the manipulation of management information

CMIS/P is the OSI systems management service and protocol used as the base technology for the telecommunications management network. It is a generic object oriented protocol that provides multiple object access capabilities to managed object clusters administered by agent applications. Its navigation and object selection capabilities rely on traversing containment relationships. This is restrictive because information models for emerging broadband technologies (SDH/SONET, ATM) exhibit various other relationships. We present extensions to the CMIS service that provide a richer access language and show how these extensions can be supported by corresponding extensions to the CMIP protocol. These extensions allow traversal of any object relationship and filtering out objects at any stage of the selection process. CMIS++ provides much greater expressive power than CMIS, while CMIP++ supports the remote evaluation of the corresponding expressions, minimizing the management traffic required for complex management information retrieval. These extensions follow an incremental approach, starting from a version compatible with the current standard and gradually adding sophisticated features. The applicability and importance of the proposed concepts is demonstrated through an example from SDH management, while we also discuss implementation considerations.