Design and implementation of a multi-threaded TMN agent system

A telecommunications management network adopts the OSI manager-agent model in which an agent system plays a more important role than a manager system. Because the existing agent systems sequentially perform a CMIS operation on selected managed objects, it cannot guarantee quick response time when many managed objects are selected. We propose a multi-threaded process structure for the agent system which performs CMIS operations concurrently on managed objects. We implemented our agent system using OSIMIS-4.O TMN platform in Solaris. We measured response time to a CMIS operation to evaluate the performance of our system. Experimental results show that the performance of our system is not so good when network resources reside within the agent system, but very good when network resources reside outside the agent system.