Facilitating Adaptive Placement of Management and Control Functions in Converged ICT Systems - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 59

interface, define how the management capability interacts with other
management capabilities on the level of organization (vertical) and
collaboration (horizontal).
More specifically, the collaboration interface is related to algorithm logic
and deals with exchanging information or commands such that a certain
management algorithm can be performed collaboratively across several
instances of the same type of management capability, or across different
functions collaboratively in order to achieve a certain management task. The
particular implementation of this interface may follow different
communication and programming styles, for instance, an RPC or REST style,
discussed in more detail in Sec. 3.4. A typical interaction of an aggregation
algorithm, such as A-GAP [19], for instance, may be the exchanging of partly
aggregated values, and the management algorithm component would make
them a full aggregate eventually that is finally sent in upward direction.
The organization interface has two major tasks. Firstly, it exposes
information to higher levels of abstraction along the organization hierarchy,
the information typically being aggregated or filtered towards a high level of
presentation (e.g. at the management console). Second, the interface receives
objectives that are expressed in a higher level of abstraction and transforms
them into lower level ones. This interface may also follow different
programming styles (Sec. 3.4).

to/f rom higher levels of abstraction

point line indicates deployable unit

organization interf ace

management
capability

component
interf aces

inf ormation
retrieval
component

objective
enf orcement
component

collaboration
interf ace

collaboration
interf ace

management
algorithm component

Fig. 3. Structure of management/control capabilities .

Both organization and collaboration interfaces exist virtually independent
of the location in which a management capability is executed, which is the
key enabling concept for placing a management capability in any location of
the system that is to be managed (see Sec. 4).