Experiences in the development of CORBA based persistent telecommunication network management agent prototypes

This paper describes our experiences in the design and development of persistent CORBA based, network management agent prototypes. Two prototypes are discussed in this paper, both CORBA based, with persistence provided by a RDBMS and another by an ODBMS. The use of CORBA facilitates an alternative interaction model to the traditional OSI/TMN approach, converging a defacto standard for distributed systems with the management of a telecommunications network. The motivation for such a convergence is a reduction in the costs of management software. CORBA provides a good software architecture with well defined application boundaries, this facilitates component reuse and shorter lead time. In the prototypes, CORBA is used for distribution, modifying the traditional OSI/TMN framework, but increasing the flexibility of the system by providing encapsulation of software components. Encapsulation of components enables the re-configuration and replacement of components during the system life cycle. The prototypes described integrate an ORE with an RDBMS/ODBMS in order to support the persistence of management data, the recoverability of management data in the event of a crash and to guarantee the integrity of management data with concurrent access. The prototypes described here imply a moving away from managing systems communicating with agent systems towards clients communicating directly with managed objects.