Facilitating Adaptive Placement of Management and Control Functions in Converged ICT Systems - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 66

• Function replacement during runtime: While hierarchical and

distribution structures of the management and control system do not
always change, it sometimes is necessary to replace certain
components. In a concrete case, an aggregation algorithm that
aggregates data related to the anomaly of the described scenario may
change. In this case, replacing just the management algorithm
component of a management capability (see Fig. 3 ) is necessary. This is
also supported by the proposed framework and can be readily
implemented by frameworks such as OSGi.

• Performance optimization of a management and control system:

Dynamic placement allows to “experiment” with different locations of
a function in the system and to choose the best placement after having
assessed different trials. For example, it might not be immediately clear
what is the best function placement due to system complexity. This
would correspond to a more short-term dynamic placement, rather than
a long-term dynamics for evolution in the managed/controlled system,
which is both supported by our framework.

5 Conclusion

In this paper, we proposed a framework for adaptive placement of
management and control functions in converged ICT systems. The framework
introduces management capabilities and their internal composition as the basic
component to compose complex management and control structures that are
flexible with respect to the placement and wiring of individual functional
parts.
The framework particularly considers the dimensions of hierarchical and
distributed composition of management functions, and provides the means to
implement more flexibly combinations that are compatible and do not have to
coexist without intersection. In other words, the proposed concepts do not
force the adoption of specific technologies that work in a specific distribution
scheme, but these can be combined. Fundamentally, that is possible if
management capabilities are described and the interfaces are understood
between different components, which might require a certain degree of
standardization. In this paper we also studied a scenario integrating
management and control (M&C) of different technology domains, namely, IT
and network, and different M&C technologies, OpenFlow and SNMP.
While our simulation prototype gives valuable insights into the adaptive
placement of management functions and shows that it is beneficial to have
support for flexible function placement, the framework needs yet to be