Exploiting the power of OSI Management
for the control of SNMP-capable resources
using generic application level gateways
Kevin McCarthy, George Pavlou, Saleem Bhatti
Department of Computer Science, University College London,
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
tel.: +44 71-380-7215, fax: +44 71 387 1397
e-mail: k.mccarthy, g.pavlou, s.bhatti @cs.ucl.ac.uk
José Neuman De Souza
Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Ceara,
Pici Campus, 60000 - Fortaleza - Ceara, BRAZIL.
tel.: +55 85 226-4419, fax: +55 85 223-1333
e-mail: neuman@lia.ufc.br
Abstract
A major aspect of Open Systems’ network management is the inter-working between distinct
Management architectures. This paper details the development of a generic object oriented
application level gateway that achieves seamless coexistence between OSI and SNMPv1 man-
agement systems. The work builds upon the Network Management Forum’s ‘ISO/CCITT and
Internet Management Coexistence’ activities. The power of the OSI Systems Management
Functions is made available for the management of SNMPv1 based resources, bringing fully
event driven management to the SNMP domain.
Keywords
OSI, SNMP, Q-Adapter, Gateway.
1 INTRODUCTION
Whether driven by technological merit, simplicity of development or government profiles,
considerable investments have been made and will continue to be made into the provision of
network management solutions based on the two dominant management architectures,
namely SNMPv1 [RFC1155, RFC1157, RFC1212] and OSI [X701,X720]. They exist
together so they must be made to coexist, so as to achieve global inter-working across hetero-
geneous platforms in the management domain.
It is the authors’ contention that coexistence can most readily be achieved by selecting a
semantically rich reference model as the basis for this inter-working. Such an approach can
then be readily extended to encompass both up and coming technologies such as CORBA
[OMG91], together with architectures that have not yet bridged the synaptic gap in the collec-
tive minds of