Research Questions of GMD-FOKUS

Development of a TMN Management Platform

Our current TMN management platform prototype provides an object-oriented development and run-time environment for management services. One main research topic of the MinoS group is to enhance this prototype regarding the following aspects:

Enhancement of our GDMO definition tool DAMOCLES to support the distributed and colloborative creation and maintenance of a management information model
Development of the tool COMPASS (Composition of Management Applications and Services) that enables the fast and comfortable development of management services by supporting the re-use of existing, i. e. already implemented, management functions and the specification and implementation of new management functions
Development and implementation of concepts to support transactions within intra- and inter-domain management
Exploration of the possible use of OMG/CORBA technology within TMN and implementation of demo scenarios

Contact: Andreas Dittrich

For questions regarding COMPASS contact: Linda Strick

Management of Teleservices

In the area of Teleservices Management FOKUS has realised a prototype for the management of a Multimedia Global Store. Emphasis has been put on the following research topics:

Generic Management Functions

During the definition of MFs for the global store we identified a set of generic, i.e. reusable Management Functions. These are structured to the management functional areas of TMN:

Customer Query & Control
Accounting Management
Configuration Management
Provisioning

Real Resource Coupling of Managed Objects

The coupling between MOs and "real resources" has shown to be costly, because on the one hand the teleservice was not designed to be managed by external management services, and on the other hand each coupling must be designed, specified and implemented seperately

Management Interfaces of Teleservices

One result of the project is an API, which provides access to the most frequently needed management services in the teleservices context. This API should be considered during development of a teleservice to allow the teleservice to be managed by an Andromeda based Management Application.

The experiences form this project lead to the following research topics and questions, which are partially investigated by the DEIMOS project:

How could the definition of Management Functions and Services be supported by a tool?
Which phases of MF / MS development could be supported by a tool?
How could such a tool look like?
Which of the object-oriented modelling techniques could be used for MF / MS development? Could an existing modelling technique be extended to meet the additional requirements?

A prototype for such a tool shall be implemented (COMPASS).

Contact: Linda Strick or Stephan Paschke

Personal Mobility Support/Personalisation

Another common research topic is related to personal mobility support and personalisation of telecommunication services. We are developing a Personal Communication Support System (PCSS) which uses our TMN-based inter- & intra-domain management infrastructure to provide communication services to mobile users. We are focusing on

personal communication support (e.g. travelling user),
personalisation (e.g. personally adaptable end user profiles) and
Service Interaction (for example to read the text of an e-Mail message for a user at a GSM phone)

Contact: Thomas Magedanz
Email:   magedanz@fokus.gmd.de

Another hot topic elaborated in co-operation with the research group of Prof. Adam Wolisz at TU Berlin is related to terminal mobility. We focus our research on the OSI layers 2-4 in connection to wireless technology and mobility. In particular we work on:

Wireless MAC protocols - simulations and analysis
Prototypical implementation and installation of an in-house wireless localisation infrastructure
Mobile internetworking (mobile IP, mobility effects on transport layer protocol, general approaches for localization of mobile terminals)
Measurements of WLAN products (MeshNet2 - ARLAN, WAVELAN) and tool development
Wireless ISDN

Contact: Prof. Adam Wolisz
Email:   wolisz@fokus.gmd.de

Inter-domain Management

One main research topic at GMD-Fokus is related to inter-domain management (IDM) focusing on the relationship between public network and/or teleservice provider domains and corporate customer/(private) user domains.

Following you will find some related activities and questions:

Requirements Analysis on inter-domain management related problems
Integration of telecommunication (TMN/OSI-based) and corporate management Systems (SNMP-based)
Integrated intra-domain management related problems (integration of systems, network element, network, services & business management)
How could X.500 Directory systems be used to support inter-domain management (representing domain and policy specific information) ?
Which alternative (to X.500) or additional information systems could be used to support inter-domain management and integrated intra-domain management ?
How to model, specify and represent policy related information (for intra- and inter-domain management) ?
Use of RM-ODP concepts to model distributed IDM systems
Use of OMG technology to implement IDM systems

Contact: Michael Tschichholz

Last Modification: Friday, 28-Apr-95 17:17:20 MET DST, Stephan Paschke