The OAM System in Component Router

The OAM (operations and maintenance) module of a router fulfills the management and manipulation of the router. The OAM is one of the most important sub system in a router, guaranteeing it to work in going order. With the rapid development of the network protocols, it is increasingly important to dynamically upgrade router's software. In this paper, the authors make a thorough research on the operation and maintenance system in routers. First the CR-OAM (component-router-OAM) design requirements and evolutions are introduced. Then the authors present the component-router's architecture and the CR-OAM function requirements, that component-router is developed by Tsinghua University in China, the design and implementation of the CR-OAM is also described in detail, whose novel feature is the ability to dynamically load and configure extensible component at run time. At last research directions and open problems in this area are discussed.