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Stimulus Package!!!
I think by now we have heard enough about the Stimulus Package that it is about time we look into the details of what it means to those of us who are in the telecom and networking segments.
When it comes to technology investment the Stimulus Package from the Obama administration, in a nutshell, focuses on three major areas (i) Broadband connectivity (ii) Smart Grid and (iii) Electronic Medical Records.
In this newsletter we will focus on broadband connectivity.
According to a recent survey, United States doesn’t rank within the top 5 countries in the world when it comes to internet connection speed or high speed broadband connectivity (for those who are curious to know who the top 5 countries in internet connection speed are, it is South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Romania and Sweden; in broadband connectivity the top 5 countries are (again): South Korea, Japan, Romania, Sweden and Hong Kong). It is quite obvious that at the present time communication infrastructure is extremely important in increasing the productivity of the labor force which helps in the creation of more jobs and improving the economy – goals of the Obama Administration!
The stimulus package is targeting about $7 billion to improving the broadband connectivity. FCC has time until next February to come up with what will hopefully become a national broadband strategy and determine how the money should be spent. It appears that the FCC will look at ways to improve the broadband coverage so that people living in rural areas have access to high speed Internet. And it will also be looking at ways to improve the speeds of existing infrastructure. Many telecommunications experts say the new broadband framework being laid out will be the biggest task the FCC has handled since implementing the Telecom Act of 1996!
The allocation of funding for broadband expansion is being administered in two primary ways: through the US Department of Commerce via the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) and through the U.S. Department of Agriculture via the Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The agencies typically favor projects that are “shovel ready “ and can quickly create jobs and simulate the economy.
You can get more detailed information about the stimulus package by clicking on the following link:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h1enr.pdf
Dhyan Infotech Inc is a software and services company that helps Equipment Vendors differentiate their products in the market place. Dhyan's EMS technology, DNMS (Dhyan Network/Element Management System), is a component based Element Management System, which has been widely deployed by Dhyan's customers at many Service Providers both small and large
If you have questions on EMS or related topic that you would like to get answered or would like to write a guest column in this newsletter, please send an email to ems-energizer@dhyanit.com. This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe
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Policy Based Network Management
Traditional management systems are characterized with static management decision operations that lack the ability for situation and context adaptability. With the advent of new generation networks and emerging services, vendors are reinventing network management, transforming its role from passive network monitoring to active QoS (Quality of Service) and network service-level-agreement provisioning. They look forward to configuring the network service as a whole by describing and implementing high-level business policies, rather than managing the network one device at a time. A sample business policy could be like “Give my traffic the guaranteed bandwidth and highest priority”.
Policy Based Network Management approach, which has recently gained prominence, provides mechanisms that can be used to address this problem. The Policy Based Management (PBM) provides a way of managing network elements and services using business policies rather than managing one device at a time. Policies are high level operating rules that describe the different kind of actions or relationships between objects. When policies are explicitly defined, the devices in the network can refer to these policies.
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Policy Management Tool (PMT) |
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Policy Decision Point (PDP) |
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Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) |
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Policy Repository (PR) |
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Policy Management Tool
It is a graphical user interface tool used for specifying, editing, and administering different policies to be enforced in a network. Polices contain rules to govern how resources should be used, or how applications and user services should be treated. It forms a bridge between SLA and provisioning the actual parameters on the network elements. A policy-based management system allows administrators to define rules based on certain questions and manage them in the policy system. These rules take the form "If condition, then action." A condition may be a user or group, time of day, application type, or network address. The action component specifies the action that is to be performed by the device in that situation.
Policy Decision Point
Policy Decision Point (PDP) also known as Policy Server retrieves the stored policies, interprets the policies, validates them and sends them to Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) such as routers and bridges to be enforced. Policy Server, in addition to retrieving, interpreting and enforcing policies, also detects policy conflicts, receives role descriptions, policy decision requests from PEPs and also returns policy decisions to them. PDPs also send asynchronous policy decisions based on updates or external requests. PDP is also responsible for handling events and making decisions based on those events (i.e., at time x do y), and updating the PEP configuration appropriately.
Policy Enforcement Point
Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) exists in network nodes such as routers, firewalls, and hosts. It enforces the policies based on the "if condition then action" rule sets it has received from the PDP. Policy enforcement involves the PEP applying actions according to the PDP’s decision and based on current network conditions. These conditions can be static (source or destination IP address) or dynamic (current bandwidth availability, time of the day). PEP will use different southbound interface (SNMP, XML, CLI or proprietary) to communicate with the network elements.
Policy repository
The policies that are created by Policy Management Tool are stored in policy repositories. Policy repository is a place to store and retrieve policy information, such as an LDAP server or a DEN (Directory Enabled Network) device.
The simplification in management is obtained primarily by centralizing the definition of policies in a single repository. Policy rules are then distributed to network resources. Policy-based management systems are best for large networks where large numbers of devices are easier to manage from a central location.
Protocol
IETF based Common Open Policy Service (COPS) protocol is used for the communication between PDP and PEP. COPS is a client/server protocol that provides transport services for moving policy information among IP network nodes. Currently there are two versions of the COPS protocol namely COPS for dynamic QoS and COPS for device provisioning. Because COPS has a well-defined parameter set, implementing multi vendor support is much easier. |
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Benefits of PBM
Policy-based capabilities provide following business values: |
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Enables dynamic responsiveness to changing business needs and conditions, providing the foundational infrastructure necessary for a real time enterprise |
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Increases quality of service through a faster, dynamic response to changing business requirements and through the reduction in human error |
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Significantly reduces cost through continual automation and elimination of administrator involvement |
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Guaranteed QoS on WiMAX network using PBM
WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) standard provides a business opportunity in delivering access for fixed and mobile broadband wireless services to residential and business subscribers. This standard is designed to handle different traffic types with different QoS mechanisms. The signaling and bandwidth allocation algorithms are highly dynamic with the ability to accommodate hundreds of connections.
Emerging services such as Voice and Video services delivered over the WiMax network are highly sensitive to delay, jitter and bandwidth fluctuations and providing QoS guarantees are very critical. Deployment of different services, require a robust service provisioning architecture to manage them properly, and make them scaleable and extendable to new technologies. The following case study explains how the Policy based management can be deployed on a WiMAX network.
| The WiMAX forum’s Network Working Group has developed a network reference model to serve as an architecture framework for WiMAX deployments. The overall network may be logically divided into three parts: |
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Connectivity Service Network (CSN), which provides IP connectivity and all the IP core network functions. |
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Access Service Network (ASN), containing gateways and base stations that form the radio access network. |
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Mobile Stations (MS) used by the end user to access the network. |
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In the WiMAX network architecture, multiple Access Service Networks (ASNs) are connected to Core Service Network (CSN). CSN contains policy server and AAA server to keep policy and subscriber databases. Each ASN has an ASN Gateway (ASN GW) which will be connected to one or more Base Stations (BSs). Each BS can communicate to multiple Subscriber Stations (SS) or Mobile Stations (MS) simultaneously. ASN GW will do the Admission Control and Service Flow Authorization (SFA) functions. Also it has policy enforcement function (PEF) to enforce the policy rules. BS does the Service Flow Management (SFM) to manage the packet flow.
In the proposed architecture policy function is added in the BS to provision it through policy rules. SFA communicates with AAA server for authorization and to get the subscriber profile. Based on the profile, policy enforcement function (PEF) in ASN GW and BS will retrieve the appropriate policy rules and configure the parameters. If required, policy server (Policy Decision Points) can push the policy rules to PEFs to dynamically reconfigure the system parameters.
In this approach, Policy Management Tool (PMT) is used to build the policy rules and SLAs. For different services (VOIP, IPTV, etc), the performance requirement are mapped on to QoS and traffic parameters. The SLAs shall be used in the AAA server for subscriber profile. During the admission request from a SS, admission control function of the ASN will get the subscriber profile with SLA. Admission control will pass the SLA to policy enforcement function (PEF) which in turn retrieves the details of the policies from the policy server (PDP). In this architecture, the same policies are sent to all the network elements in the end-to-end service flow path. The element specific parameter or command is translated at the element level (in PEP). Also, the policy can be defined to provision/configure the network elements without complexity.
Since the COPS protocol works in client server model, the policies are pulled from policy server in the network elements when required and pushed to the network elements from policy server when there is change in the policy. The PEP will store the policy in the local database for the immediate processing. So more number of network elements can be managed in this architecture.
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If you have any comments or questions or would like to write a guest column in the energizer, please send an email to
ems-energizer@dhyanit.com
This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe.
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© 2009 Copyrights Reserved. Dhyan Infotech |
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| Participation in trade shows: |
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May 17 - 21, 2009
Mandalay Bay Convention Center,
Las Vegas, NV |
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Is it possible to enhance the existing SNMP based Management System to Policy based Management System?
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The traditional SNMP-based configuration management is a data concentric approach, whereby the operator has to feed the data.
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Policy based configuration management consists of configuration of abstract policies. Configuration of a single business policy would represent an action applied to a bunch of variables in SNMP.
The SNMPConf working group has initiated efforts on enhancing the SNMP framework to provide all the necessary capabilities required. It has released Policy Management MIB defining the managed objects to distribute policies. This policy management MIB contains the generic policy information like policy filters, roles, devices, schedules, capabilities. The service or domain specific information will be defined using service specific MIB module. The MIB definitions are available for services like Differentiate Services (DIFFSERV) and IP Security (IP-SEC) etc. By including these MIB implementations on the SNMP entities, the policy management capabilities can be incorporated.
This approach requires less development effort. But there are some shortages from the original concept of the policy based management such as highly complex policies can not be defined, dynamically updating the network of any changes in the policy etc.
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Dear Ram, |
I would like to formally acknowledge our gratitude and support that we received from your team over the last several months.
As you know we had recently established a development center in Belfast, Ireland to better serve our European customers and had to transfer the development of our management application (which is based on Dhyan Network Management System technology) from our primary development center in Ottawa, Canada to our Belfast development center. What made the transfer challenging was that it had to be done in a short time frame and without significantly impacting the release dates!
Dhyan team members working closely with the technical team in Belfast were key to transferring product ownership successfully to the Belfast center. They displayed strong knowledge of the full software design and helped support and mentor the Belfast team during the handover, and exhibited commendable pride and commitment to the project. In addition their support for the team in Ottawa has also been invaluable over the last number of weeks which has helped our Ottawa and Belfast teams converge on a successful product release.
Please pass on our gratitude to the team.
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Yours faithfully
VP and GM, European Center |
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