ENERGy

Empowered NEtwoRk manaGement

ENERGy

Communication networks of today are mostly. optimised for specific user requirements. Thus, a network operation might end up in heterogeneous environments, with many inter-system exchanges. The management of these networks in order to satisfy the needs of the end-user is therefore costly. Additionally, these solutions utilise their own, non interoperable management tools and interfaces. Thus, the so-called Operations Support Systems (OSS) are becoming huge systems, needing almost half of their investments only to integrate dissimilar systems. The challenges of the ENERGy project were to master the complexity of network heterogeneity and to provide reliable services for high Quality of Service (QoS) and minimum downtime in an automated way.

The ENERGy project aimed to allow coordinated management of heterogeneous network services and resources, simplify the network management complexity, and allow reducing costs while maintaining a higher network quality than before. The major focus to be covered by the ENERGy project was on the automation in service and policy management, web-based network management, security management, and tele-management. For this, all network solutions, even solutions to come, are to be integrated into one framework for management systems, enabling the automatic management, i.e., cooperative monitoring, configuration, and reconfiguration of the networks.

In this project, ifak was responsible for allowing the interoperability of industrial networks with network management concepts of global network providers. In the demonstrator domain “Control of heterogeneous networks” of the project ifak integrated industrial network sites into a public network by industrial gateways providing WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) based interfaces for telecommunication network management applications.