Embedded Agents

Most electronic telecom equipment is provided with some kind of management interface. Most operators require that the management interface adheres to some specific standard, typically based on SNMP, CORBA or CMIP/TMN. If you are a small equipment vendor, this may be the obstacle that precludes you from providing your equipment to the big operators.

An embedded agent is a function inside an equipment, a switch or a repeater, which provides the external management interface to your equipment, i.e. it is an "agent" on behalf of the management system.

Solution

Development of embedded agents is a fundamental application of Q3ADE. Q3ADE offers a wide range of features are needed in most high-end real-time control applications today, like real-time persistency (saves the state to disk on-the-fly and recover after crash/reboot) and an advanced environment for non-blocking multi-threaded software development.

Q3ADE Advanced Developer provides you with an integrated development environment that enables you to develop the embedded agent software and the element management software in one development process. This package includes Q3ADE's default management protocol interface CMIP(hence the Q3), the most powerful of the standard management protocols. CMIP is accepted by all the major telecom management platforms, like HP OpenView, HP/Compaq TeMIP, Solstice and Bull/Evidian OpenMaster.

Q3ADE Gateway Developer provides you with a range of technology gateway's that enables you to provide all the most generally used management protocols by one and the same agent. Hence you save development of several adaptation solutions to different customer's needs. You may provide both a CORBA, a CMIP and a HTTP/HTML management interface by the same agent. Ie. the equipment may be accessed directly from a web browser (doing local configuration) and from several high-end management systems at the same time.

The agent will interact seamlessly with Q3ADE 3G. You only need to import the information models you have developed for your agent directly into the Q3ADE 3G platform. The integration between Q3ADE 3G and Q3ADE agents include advanced fault management, security management and extensive configuration management options. Hence you save considerable time on the development of element management software as well.

Scalability

A frequently asked question is how many "object" a Q3ADE agent can hold and how many transactions per second it can serve. The answer to these questions is not a single figure, since depends strongly on the complexity of the agent. But as an indicator: We have performed tests on an agent with more than 10 million object instances, producing more than 1000 get replies per second on a fairly "plain" PC configuration. And by utilizing Q3ADE's unique MIB-on-Disk technology and intensive use of multi-threading combined with a high-grade multiprocessor technology, you can scale this with several factors. So it should serve pretty much any practical need you may have.

Benefits

• Numerous open standardized management interfaces. Satisfy your customer's requirements out-of-the-box. Save a lot of development effort for adaptation, maintenance of customer specific solutions.
• Advanced generic agent functionality. 80% of an agent's functionality deals with standard tasks like connection management, access control, event routing, operation validation, persistency, self management etc. Q3ADE's standard agent engine provides all this. Saves 80% of your development time.
• Highly scalable architecture. Q3ADE's multithreading and persistent object support is your guarantee that your agent can cope with any size of your agent. (> 10M objects, >1000 TPS tested).
• Integrated self test utilities. Q3ADE's self-monitoring of memory, protocls and threads ensures that any malfunction is detected immediately and save you a lot of development/test time. You need no other test tool.
• Agent/Manager development in one go. Q3ADE's unique integrated agent/manager development concept saves you from having two separate development projects. The time and frustrations saved is invaluable. You only need one tool. You may reuse your programmer's expertize. You do not need to coordinate two departments, etc. etc. Cf. also "Simulating and Testing Management Applications".

Pricing

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