Facilitating Adaptive Placement of Management and Control Functions in Converged ICT Systems - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 60

Internal Structure of Management Capabilities
While a management capability's interfaces allow for the necessary flexibility
in placing the capability into the managed system's runtime environment as a
whole, a more detailed decomposition of MCs is used to make placement also
flexible with respect to organization and collaboration tasks independently.
In order to allow this, without loss of generality, three basic components
make up a management capability's interior. Within the management
algorithm component, the actual management algorithm, such as A-GAP, is
located. This component is associated with collaboration and only exposes a
lean interface via which information that is relevant for the organization
perspective is transferred. This interface is usually well understood by the
algorithm designer and can be defined appropriately, but also be extended
easily. For instance, in the case of A-GAP, the top-level aggregation result
may be accessed via this interface in upstream direction, and basic threshold
parameters of the aggregation algorithm may be set in downstream direction.
The management algorithm component is further mapped to the management
capabilities external collaboration interface to allow for communication with
other MCs.
The information retrieval component and objective enforcement component
are responsible for handling information retrieval and composition in
upstream and downstream direction along the organization hierarchy. Note
that objectives might also be called policies. In this paper, we strive to be
independent of the particular mechanisms used to specify objectives, so
policies but also simple configuration of thresholds may all be executed via
the organization path. Both components perform tasks that are related to
organization only. For instance, the information retrieval component may
simply receive the top-level aggregate from one management capability and
hand it over to any other management capability via the organization
interface. The objective enforcement component receives objectives (policies)
from upper levels in the organization hierarchy and may parameterize both the
internal policy and the management algorithm component. An example for the
latter case is to adapt the performance of a management algorithm, e.g.
increase the aggregation latency for a tradeoff of aggregation accuracy.
3.2 Management and Control Structures
From individual management capabilities, arbitrarily complex management
and control structures can be created. Such structures extend vertically from
one or several global management points that terminate the information chain
at the most abstract level (e.g. management consoles) down to MCs that
terminate the management/control hierarchy at the lower end, e.g. at