Transaction scheduling for interoperability in heterogeneous network management systems

Abstract

Large communication networks typically consist of multiple interconnected subnetworks and span a number of different organizations. For the purpose of managing such networks, each organization is generally certain to have its own network management system which reflects different management policies. Although each network management system is operated by different organization, there are many cases that it should need sharing of management data and information of others. Therefore, in the perspective of information sharing, interoperability between network management systems is demanded as a mandatory requirement for muti-domain network management. In order to support interoperability of network management systems, it is important to provide them with an ability of locating, selecting or accessing other``s management data necessary for managing their own network efficiently. In this paper, we propose an architectural model to provide interoperability between network management systems and import operations for importing and selecting necessary data out of multiple information sources as a primary means for offering interoperability. The import operations provide management applications with functionality of expressing constraint and preference over target data. In case that a data import request is aimed at a number of data stored at local database systems of different network management systems, the request inevitably becomes a global transaction that targets multiple databases. A major issue in scheduling global transaction is how to ensure global serializability. To assure global serializability, we propose Global Ticket Method which uses global tickets. The global ticket is a logical timestamp whose value is stored as a data item at management data broker that is a core component in the proposed architectural model. In order for Global Ticket Method(GTM) to ensure global serializability, global serializability validation algorithms which are executed on m...