Facilitating Adaptive Placement of Management and Control Functions in Converged ICT Systems - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 58

distribution

a bstra ction

hierarchy

a utonomy embedding

Fig. 2. Design space of management and control on 5 dimensions .

Figure 2 is an extension to the design space that we introduced previously
in [3], where we have identified the degree of autonomy, abstraction, and
embedding as three fundamental dimensions along which various network
management functions can be designed. In this paper, we focus on distribution
and hierarchy; the concepts we present in the following are orthogonal to the
work presented in [3], [4], [35].

3.1 Management/Control Capabilities

Let us start by examining the distribution and hierarchy scale in more
detail, where we can identify an intersection between both as a suitable
starting point of our design. In that intersection, a transition from vertical to
horizontal processing of management tasks (flows) occurs. We explicitly
distinguish the semantics of these flows into organization (vertical) and
collaborative (horizontal) to indicate the different nature of these flows. For
instance, organization tasks may be used to inject high-level objectives or
report key performance indicators, while collaboration implements the
algorithms that obtain the values for these.
Based on this view, we define the basic constituting component of
management capability (MC) which we have introduced on a high level in [3].
In order to define its role in acting as a transitional element (mediator)
between organization and collaboration flows of management, we also define
its internal structure in such a way that it can flexibly support that transition
without defining the specific management task. Fig. 3 depicts the structure of
a management capability.

External Interfaces of Management Capabilities

Let us consider the management capability's external interfaces first that
integrate the capability into more complex management and control structures
(Sec. 3.2). Two distinct interfaces, termed organization and collaboration