An active temporal model for network management databases

The purpose of a network management system is to provide smooth functioning of a large heterogeneous network through monitoring and controlling of network behavior. ISO/OSI has defined six management functionalities that aid in overall management of a network: configuration, fault, performance, security, directory and accounting management. These management functionalities provide tools for overall graceful functioning of the network on both day-to-day and long-term basis. All of the functionalities entail dealing with huge volumes of data. So network management in a sense is management of data, like a DBMS is used to manage data. This is precisely our purpose in this paper to show that by viewing the network as a conceptual global database the six management functionalities can be performed in a declarative fashion through specification of management functionalities as data manipulation statements.