PIRR: a methodology for distributed network management in mobile networks

The current centralized Network Management approach in mobile networks may lead to problems with being able to scale up when new customer services and network nodes will be deployed in the network. The next generation mobile networks proposed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) envision a flat network architecture comprising some thousands of network nodes, each of which will need to be managed, in a timely and efficient fashion. This consideration has prompted a research activity to find alternative application architectures that could overcome the limits of the current centralized approaches. section approach to deal with the increasing network size and complexity is to move from a centralized Network Management system to a more distributed or decentralized approach where each Network Management application consists of a controller part and a set of distributed parts running on the individual network elements. This approach however raises questions of how to measure and estimate the resource requirements when planning to distribute the Network Management applications in the mobile networks before starting to produce commercial systems. In this paper, we describe the PIRR methodology we have developed to measure resource requirements for distributed applications in mobile networks and the experimental findings of its application to new Network Management applications.