CN1312945C - Method for realizing cascade proxy in telecommunication network management system - Google Patents

Abstract

A method for implementing cascaded agents in a telecommunications network management system, characterized in that the method includes the following steps: part of the process of the manager: sending a public management information service request CMIS to the agent; part of the process of the agent: constructing a network element management information base MIB; When the system is started, the agents at all levels load the corresponding network element management information base MIB; the information of each agent in the system forms a global and unified management information tree MIT in a cascade relationship; analyze the public management information service request, and execute the management information tree CMIS primitives. Compared with the prior art, the present invention controls the network element management scope of the "manager" through the cascading relationship of "agents", realizes transparent operation in the whole system, reduces system cost, improves work efficiency and accuracy performance, which greatly saves communication maintenance costs.

Description

A Realization Method of Cascading Agent in Telecom Network Management System

technical field

The invention relates to the field of mobile communication network management, in particular to a method for realizing dynamic cascading of agent groups in a CDMA mobile communication network management system.

Background technique

In the prior art, a telecommunication network includes a core network and a management network. Among them, the telecommunication management network TMNN (Telecomm Management Net) can be logically divided into five layers, and the bottom two layers are the network element management layer and the network element layer. The network element layer mainly refers to the CDMA network elements in the packet core network, such as HLR/AUR, MSC/VLR, BTS, BSC, etc. In actual operation, operators hope to implement multi-level management of network elements in a province at the network element management level, for example: it can be divided into provincial management, municipal management (or local maintenance center), local (bureau) Management, etc., the number and scope of network elements managed by each level are different: at the provincial level, it is responsible for managing the network elements of the entire province; at the local maintenance center, it is responsible for managing all network elements in its jurisdiction; at the local level, it is responsible for A network element management.

In the telecommunications management network, the information structure adopts the "manager/agent" model. The "manager" is responsible for processing the management logic of the system; the "agent" is responsible for directly interacting with network elements and executing the public management information service CMIS (Common Management Information Service) request. Therefore, if a "manager" needs to manage network elements in a certain area, it must be able to send a request to its "agent" directly or indirectly.

First of all, in the existing technology, the "manager" is mainly used to directly connect with the agents of all network elements in the local area, or the "manager" itself is cascaded to meet the multi-level management of network element management. need. However, both approaches have the following disadvantages:

1. "Managers" are difficult to unify: Since "managers" have different management requirements at different levels, if "managers" are cascaded or directly interact with the underlying network elements, maintenance centers at all levels need to Information is extracted to a certain extent, and it is difficult for the same "manager" to manage network elements at different levels in a unified manner;

2. The network is single, the structure is not flexible, and it is difficult to realize distributed control: when a public management information service CMIS request involves multiple network elements, the "manager" needs to perform extremely complex transaction control; for example: provincial network elements The management center needs to be connected with all network elements. When there are many network elements in a province, the provincial Manager needs a huge communication maintenance overhead.

Secondly, in the existing standards, although the cascading method is also adopted, it is mainly aimed at the cascading between the network management center and the network element management layer or a higher system level, focusing on standardization and interoperability, but not on The problem of multi-level cascading at the network element level.

Contents of the invention

The purpose of the present invention is aimed at the defects in the above-mentioned background technology, and proposes a method for realizing cascading agents in the telecommunication network management system, adopting multi-level cascading agents, and forming a unified model of network element management information and agents Scalable distributed dynamic, multi-level Agent structure, in order to build a network element management system flexibly and conveniently in the network element management layer.

A method for realizing cascading agents in a telecommunication network management system proposed by the present invention is characterized in that the method comprises the following steps:

Manager section:

(1) Send the public management information service request CMIS to the agent;

Proxy part:

(2) Build network element management information base MIB;

(3) When the system is started, the agents at all levels load the corresponding network element management information base MIB;

(4) Each agent information in the system constitutes a globally unified management information tree MIT in a cascading manner;

(5) analyzing the public management information service request, and executing CMIS primitives on the management information tree;

If the management information is at this level, directly execute CMIS operations;

If the management information is not at the current level, the request is directly forwarded to the lower-level Agent through the virtual MO until it is forwarded to the remote agent that directly manages the network element;

(6) After receiving the forwarded CMIS request, the remote agent performs CMIS operations on the local MO, and then returns the result to the superior agent.

Compared with the prior art, the present invention controls the network element management scope of the "manager" through the cascading relationship of "agents", and the "manager" only needs to connect to one of the "agents" to manage the network elements of the entire region. Moreover, through the unified modeling of Agent and MIT, Managers at different management levels can access the network element information of each jurisdiction in a unified way, realizing transparent operation in the entire system, reducing system costs, and improving Improve work efficiency and accuracy, greatly save communication maintenance costs.

The technical solution of the invention will be described in detail below in conjunction with the embodiments and with reference to the accompanying drawings.

Description of drawings

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram of the information system structure of the telecommunication management network of the present invention;

Fig. 2 is a schematic diagram of the "agent" information tree of the present invention;

Fig. 3 is a schematic diagram of unified modeling of "agent" and management information tree MIT of the present invention;

Fig. 4 is a schematic diagram of events of automatic discovery and dynamic cascading of new "agents" during networking of the present invention;

Fig. 5 is an operation flow chart of the present invention to uniformly access the management information base MIB of network elements through cascaded "agents".

Detailed ways

Below in conjunction with accompanying drawing, the implementation of technical scheme is described in further detail:

The method of cascading agents proposed by the invention unifies the information model of the network element and the agent. Among them, the cascading between "agents" is dynamic. Distributed control is solved through the collaboration between "agents" and concentrated among "agents". Therefore, administrators only need to access different levels of "agents" to manage network elements in different regions without participating in too complicated transactions and other distributed controls.

As shown in Figure 1, it is a schematic diagram of the information structure of TMN. Telecommunication management is an information processing process. According to the definition of the System Management Model (System Management Model) in the ITU-T X.701 recommendation, each specific management application, Both have the role of managers and agents. In the Manger/Agent architecture, on the side of the "manager" 101, the user's request is configured and managed, and various management operations are realized by sending a public management information service request (CMIS); on the side of the "agent" 102, the Network resources are managed with the information tree structure MIT, and in accordance with the TMN (TelecommManagementNet) standard and for various types of network elements, a management information base (MIB, ManagementInformation Base) is generated, where the "agent" can directly operate The resources in the management information base, that is, the network elements 103; and, these network elements can be provided by the network entity MSC/HLR, and finally, the "agent" reports to the "manager" through the event forwarding discriminator EFD (Event Forwarding Discriminator) The operation result of the operation event initiated by this request.

As shown in Figure 2, it is a schematic diagram of a tree structure of "agent" information, wherein, Manager A 201 realizes the control and manipulation of the entire MIT in the system through Agent a 202, that is, it can manage network elements in the entire region; and Manager B 203 only manages the network elements connected to Agent j 204 and its subordinate Agents (such as Agent m and Agentn); thus, one "agent" is connected to one network element, and each "agent" is connected through distributed cascading , forming an information tree. If several network elements need to be managed centrally in one jurisdiction, all "agents" in the same jurisdiction must be connected to the same superior "agent". The upper-level Agent can be further connected to form a higher-level tandem Agent, thereby forming a tree-like Agent tree. The upper-level "agent" can indirectly manage the lower-level network elements through the lower-level "agent" connected to it, and can also directly manage the network elements of the current level. The Manager only needs to be connected with the top-level Agent in a certain region to manage all the network elements in the region, instead of connecting with every Agent.

Therefore, in the multi-level networking provided by the present invention, if the "manager" accesses "agents" at different levels, he can manage network elements in different regions.

As shown in Figure 3, it is a schematic diagram of a method for unified modeling of "agent" and MIT (management information tree), wherein, in order to realize unified access and fast indexing to all network elements, the present invention virtualizes "agent" into a management Object MO, called Agent[MO]. Agent[MO] generates an information tree according to the cascading relationship of its corresponding Agent in the Agent tree; and replaces the root node of the information model in Agent with Agent[MO], so that Agent tree and MIT form a virtual The global management information model GMIM (global management information Mode).

Among them, in order to reduce the coupling of the two trees and enhance the flexibility of operation, the present invention also designs the above model into a two-level tree structure: the first level is the Agent index tree (Agent index tree), the second The level is MIT, and Agent[MO ⁿ ] is mapped to the information model MIT ⁿ of Agent ⁿ .

As shown in Figure 4, the event schematic diagram of the automatic discovery and dynamic cascading of new "agents" during the networking of the present invention, the AIT changes dynamically along with the cascading structure of the Agent itself, of course, for the sake of simplicity, it can also adopt static configuration. The Agent tree is like a group and a society. Each Agent maintains an information model and realizes certain management functions. When adding a network element, you only need to add an Agent at the corresponding level of the Agent tree, and then the Manager can manage the newly added network element. In order to realize the dynamic change of the cascade structure, the present invention adopts two methods - automatic discovery and HeartBeat, to form a dynamic and agile reaction chain. When a new Agent joins the Agent tree, the original Agent can automatically perceive the newly added Agent and establish a certain relationship with it, and at the same time modify the internal related "agent" information tree. In order to establish a correct cascading relationship between Agents, it is necessary to plan an initial networking strategy for the Agents. The networking strategy here refers to the description information of the association relationship between the upper and lower Agents, including two parts of information, one part is The identification number of the Agent's direct superior Agent: Agent[ID] _f , and the other part is the set of identification numbers of its direct subordinate Agents: S{Agent[ID] _c }. Both of the above pieces of information are optional and change during runtime as the environment changes.

1. Automatic discovery: It contains two functional components: response and discovery. When a new Agent joins the Agent tree, the automatic discovery steps are as follows:

Event 401: Discovery (active search), that is: use the identification number set S{Agent[ID] _c } of the direct subordinate Agent to automatically search for its corresponding subordinate Agent, and establish a cascading relationship with it; if the subordinate agrees to this new As its superior agent, the Agent will automatically record the ID information of the superior Agent, and give a positive response with Response; if it refuses, it will give a negative response. At this time, the discovery event of the superior Agent will delete the index of the subordinate Agent from the AIT. And modify the initial networking strategy, that is, the newly added Agent only corresponds to the upper-level Agent, but there may be no corresponding lower-level Agent;

Event 402: Response (automatic reporting), ie: use the information of the identification number Agent[ID] _f of the directly superior Agent newly added to the Agent to actively report the message of joining the Agent tree to the superior Agent. If the upper-level Agent receives the application message, Discovery will add the Agent's index in the AIT and modify the networking strategy; if the newly added Agent needs to be restarted after running for a certain period of time, it will join the Agent with the changed networking strategy information tree.

2. HeartBeat: refers to the periodical exchange of heartbeat messages between Agents that have established a cascade relationship to determine whether the other party exists. In order to avoid excessively increasing the communication load, the length of the heartbeat message should be as short as possible, and a reasonable heartbeat interval should be set. When the upper-level Agent finds that the lower-level does not exist within a certain time interval, it will automatically modify the AIT and networking policies. When the lower-level Agent finds that the upper-level Agent does not exist, it will control the reporting of network element data collected such as alarms and performance.

As shown in Figure 5, the operation flow chart of uniformly accessing MIB through cascaded Agents provided by the present invention includes two parts: the manager operation part and the agent operation part, wherein the manager operation part includes step 501, and the agent operation part Including steps 502 to 509, the specific steps of the process are as follows:

First, the Manager sends a CMIS request, step 501; the Agent retrieves the agent information tree AIT, step 502, the Agent judges whether to operate the MIB of the current level according to the BOI and Scope requested by the CMIS, step 503; if the CMIS does not operate the MIB of the current level If CMIS is a request to the MIB operation of the current level, then execute the CMIS operation, step 505; after the operation is completed, judge whether the Manager is in the current level, step 506; if When the Manager is at this level, he summarizes the data, step 507; and directly returns the operation result, step 508; if not, returns the result to the superior Agent until the result is returned to the Agent connected by the Manager, step 509.

Among them, the Manager is connected to a top-level Agent in its jurisdiction. When receiving a management request, it constructs a CMIS request with a distinguished name DN (Distinguished Name) according to a unified method, and then sends a CMIS request to the Agent at the same level. Here The interaction between Manager and Agent is realized by using CMIS primitives.

Among the above primitive operations, there are four MOs of primitive operations that may be a set S{MOn}, which are m_get, m_set, m_invoke and m_delete respectively. S{MOn} may be distributed in the same Agent or in different Agents.

After step 503 is executed, when the base object instance BOI (Base Object Instance) is not the root node, the MO involved in the Scope must be in an Agent. At this time, accessing the Agent only needs to directly forward the CMIS message to the lower-level corresponding Agent ; When the BOI is at the root node, and the Scope involves the operations of several layers of MOs under the BOI, the CMIS requests are forwarded to all lower-level Agents respectively.

Claims (12)

1. a telecom network management system cascade is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, this method may further comprise the steps:

Manager's part:

(1) sends public administration information service CMIS request to the agency;

Act on behalf of part:

(2) make up NE management information bank MIB;

(3) when system start-up, agencies at different levels load corresponding net element management information bank MIB;

(4) each proxy information in the system constitutes the unified management information tree MIT of the overall situation with cascade system;

(5) analyze described public administration information service request, management information tree is carried out CMIS primitive;

If management information, is directly carried out the CMIS operation in the corresponding levels;

If management information not in the corresponding levels, just by virtual management object MO, will be asked directly to be forwarded to subordinate and act on behalf of Agent, till the remote agent that is forwarded to direct managed network element;

(6) after remote agent is received the CMIS request of transmitting, local MO is carried out the CMIS operation, then the result is returned to higher level's agency.

2. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, the described step that sends public administration information service request CMIS to the agency, also comprise if the manager receives the management request, then structure has the CMIS request that can distinguish title, sends described CMIS request to the agency with its peer then.

3. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 2 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, the manager links to each other with a top agency in its area under one's jurisdiction, when the manager inserts acting on behalf of of different levels, the network element of different range is managed.

4. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, described analysis public administration information service request is that the agency analyzes base object example BOI and range attribute Scope in the CMIS request, may further comprise the steps:

When base object example BOI is not root node, inserts Agent and directly the CMIS forwards is acted on behalf of Agent to subordinate;

When base object example BOI at root node, and range attribute Scope then is forwarded to all subordinates respectively with the CMIS request and acts on behalf of Agent when relating to the operation of which floor MO under the BOI.

5. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, each proxy information in the described system is with the process of the unified management information tree MIT of the cascade connection formation overall situation, and is further comprising the steps of:

To act on behalf of the virtual management object Agent[MO of being of Agent];

Act on behalf of the cascade connection of Agent in agency tree Agent tree according to its correspondence, generate proxy information tree AIT;

Use Agent[MO] replace the root node of information model among the Agent.

6. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, described global administration inforamtion tree is the secondary tree structure, and the first order is to act on behalf of index tree, and the second level is the single Agent of agency management information tree.

7. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 6 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, and in the management information tree of described secondary tree structure, Agent[MO ⁿ] Agent is videoed ⁿInformation model MIT ⁿOn.

8. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, described Agent cascade structure is finished by automatic discovery incident.

9. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 8 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, described automatic discovery incident comprises automatic reporting functions, and this function may further comprise the steps:

After receiving new agency, send the adding solicitation message;

In proxy information tree AIT, increase this agency's index, and revise the networking strategy;

If initiate agency need restart, then add the proxy information tree with the networking policy information after changing after the operation regular period;

When new agency added the proxy information tree, original agency detected initiate agency automatically, and set up certain relation with it, revised inner relevant proxy information tree simultaneously.

10. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 8 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, described automatic discovery incident also comprises the active searching function, and this function may further comprise the steps:

Automatically search the corresponding agency of subordinate, set up cascade connection;

If this new agency agrees as its superior agency in subordinate, just write down the identifying information of superior agency automatically, and give sure response;

If refusal just provides negative response,, and revise initial networking strategy by superior agency agency's of this subordinate of deletion from the proxy information tree index.

11. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 8 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, sets up the jumping message of making up one's mind periodically mutually between the Agent of cascade connection in the described Agent cascade structure.

12. telecom network management system cascade as claimed in claim 1 is acted on behalf of implementation method, it is characterized in that, higher level Agent among the described NE management information bank MIB is set up lower level network element agency's virtual management object MO, and with whole lower level network element virtual be a management object.

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