Monitoring Plane Architecture and OAM Handler

The increase of new services such as content distribution and interdata center connectivity poses new requirements on the control and management of next generation networks. The application-based network operations (ABNO) is emerging as a paradigm integrating control and management functions for different types of services. Key functionalities lie in the ABNO operation, administration, maintenance (OAM) handler which is responsible for the verification and the actual maintenance of network services following specific service level agreements. The OAM handler collects and correlates alerts about potential problems and triggers actions to preserve services in case of failures or degradations. In this paper, a hierarchical monitoring architecture is presented. The architecture is proposed by building on the OAM handler functionalities. Monitoring information can be filtered and correlated at each hierarchical level guaranteeing high scalability of the management plane. Actions can be taken at each hierarchical layer based on the type of failure and of affected service. Measurements on a commercial systems are carried on to identify the generated alarms upon failure. Then, simulations show the high scalability achieved by the proposed architecture.