The Management Plane

To support the management plane of the MSNL protocol stack each entity must provide information to the management functions about its state, and possibly permit them to modify its state. The management plane is provided this access via a management interface, the entity management interface (EMI) which each entity must support. Entities which are incapable of supporting the EMI will have the EMI implemented for them by proxy objects which are capable of determining the state of the entity and forwarding this information to the management functions.

Topology Discovery

The routeing function and the control functions within a MD need to know about the topology of the MSNL internetwork to which the MD is attached. Determining the topology of the internetwork is the task of the topology discovery service (TDS). In order to perform its task the TDS requires management information from each entity in the MD to permit it to determine the connectivity of the MD. It is assumed that each pod will implement some error detection capabilities, and will gather information on its state. This information will be forwarded to the TDS across the EMI.

Other Services

Additional services may be required in order to fully implement the managment plane. These might include [1]:

• Configuration management: specifying the management of physical resources and how they are included into the configured network.
• Financial management: dealing with charging and maintenance costs.
• Resource management: this is the function managing the physical construction of the network.
• Performance management: this function must ensure that the network is tuned to meet its performance requirements in terms of user perceived QOS.
• Planning and design management: this function should aid the planning of future network facilities and enhancements.
• Access and security managment: these functions control access to the network facilities and network managment entities.