Administration and Maintenance in EPONs
In the enterprise environment, local area Ethernet networks are typically managed via
the so-called simple network management protocol (SNMP) [3]. In spite of being a flexible
management solution, this protocol generally lacks efficiency and makes a number
166 Chapter 7
of assumptions about the underlying network structure, which are not necessarily valid
in all possible cases, especially with the PON system architecture in mind. First, the
standard operation of the SNMP protocol relies basically on the operability of the network
structure and IP level connectivity (see RFC 1067 and RFC 1470), which may be
impossible to sustain should the network suffer from a fatal, low-level failure. Second,
the standard SNMP protocol implementation assumes the connected devices are accessible
at IP-level at all times, which requires provision of public IP addresses from
the ever shrinking pool of IPv4, its allocation and binding with the network equipment
and then managing the complex IP-MAC associations for the local Ethernet links. This
results therefore in deployment of a complete IP overlay on top of the Ethernet link,
even when the provided services are as plain as Point To Point (P2P) Ethernet level
connectivity, Which in the long run in an overkill for a carrier environment.
Pages:
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424