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A Virtual Private Network Service for an Open Service Market

This paper describes a virtual private network (VPN) management service developed to support IP-based multi-media teleservices in the ACTS project Prospect. The service is targeted for an open service market with multiple competing and co-operating providers. It provides end-to-end connection management in a heterogeneous network infrastructure with many owners and many network and management technologies. The user interface to the service provides a simple and easy to understand abstraction over the heterogeneous network infrastructure. An architectural separation between service core functionality and adaptations of the heterogeneous, underlying network domains, is particularly important in system design and implementation. The primary adaptations are between TMN/OSI, SNMP and CORBA-based management systems, and between diverse management model representations. Such adaptations are logically separated from the service functionality, and also physically in the implementation. The VPN management service has evolved from a purely TMN-based design and OSI-based implementation in the RACE II project PREPARE towards an open distributed, object-oriented design and CORBA-based implementation. The reference model for open distributed processing has provided the basic design principles. The paper presents the enterprise, information and computational models, the basic system architecture principles and the implementation architecture. The paper concludes that simple generic models of the heterogeneous network infrastructure facilitate end-to-end management system implementation with clear separation of service core functionality from adaptations with respect to specific network technology representations and management technologies. This is seen as essential to succeeding in developing integrated management solutions.