PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF ATM-BASED NETWORKS USING OAM MIB

Abstract

Current network management needs an end-to-end overview of various connections rather than the information that is purely local to the individual devices. The typical manager-centric polling approach is not adequate to understand network-wide behavior of large-scale broadband network. To get an end-to-end overview of the network various schemes have been proposed into the literature. In this thesis we compare two schemes based on MIB and INQIRE station. The management information base (MIB) scheme is based on the concept of operation, administration, and maintenance (OAM) cells. The MIB provides a network manager with dynamic end-to-end management information by utilizing special standard ATM cells (i.e. OAM cells). The MIB makes end-to-end management feasible while it reduces management-related traffic and manager-to-manager interactions. Another scheme for end-to-end network management uses INQIRE station. An INQIRE station, consisting of a PC running the INQIRE application, can probe any selected route with test cells and monitor the QoS of an ATM network. In the OAM scheme, OAM cells are generated from different station and inserted after every 1024 user cells. OAM cells follow the same route (i.e. same virtual channel and virtual path) as the user cells. In INQIRE station approach test cells are sent along a parallel virtual connection (VC) that has been established with the same route and QoS as the selected VC. Management information is maintained at INQIRE station. In this dissertation we studied and compared the performance of these two schemes used to get end-to-end information about cell loss, cell delay and other parameters. Software is written in C++ and runs under DOS platform.