ATM network management with distributed transactional agents

Abstract

This paper presents the ANTS (ATM Networking Transactional Society) architecture, the result of a study into the application of transactional semantics in ATM, performed by Sintef Telecom & Informatics in the ACTS project ACTranS. With a centralised approach like the one taken in TINA-C, we see a scalability problem in the inherent bottlenecks of this architecture. To address this, we have defined and described a society of cooperating agents, ANTS, with each agent governing an ATM switch. The distributed agents share among them the control of the network, delivering a scalable and flexible architecture as a basis for connection management and intelligent network services. While the introduction of distributed agents alone offer a mean to introduce services in the network, using transactions to define units of work and keep a consistent picture of the world further facilitates releasing their potential. But, while our evaluation concludes that transactions offer some conceptual relief in connection management, the transactional agent society would better serve as a useful platform for higher level services like user profiles and accounting, seamless networks and Virtual Private Networks. OMG's OTS can mostly take care of the transactional mechanisms, but we see the need for a minimalised, relaxed variant to serve its purpose in the connection management. While the concepts seem promising, a software implementation would in reality be too slow to handle the traffic. Due to the relatively high latency in CORBA and OTS, the transactional aspects will face performance trouble in the connection management, but used in higher level services we see immediate gains.