ICON: a system for implementing constraints in object-based networks

A vitally important step in network configuration management is to check the validity of updates made to data elements in the Management Information Base (MIB). For example, if an operator mistakenly configures a ninth port on an eight port card, the MIB should both detect and prevent this error. In this paper, we focus on the problem of checking MIB update validity and introduce the design of ICON (Implementing Constraints in Object-Based Networks), a proposed network constraint management system. In ICON, constraints are expressed through rules, which are based on the Event-Condition-Action paradigm. Rules and events are integrated cleanly into the object model by treating them also as objects.