An inter-domain virtual private network management service

The evolution of an open market for telecommunication services provides a wide range of opportunities for the provision of value added services by providers other than public network operators. One service already available today is that of a Virtual Private Network that provide dispersed corporate sites with wide area data and telephony capabilities using public network services. The introduction of B-ISDN allows for the provision of VPN services in a much more integrated fashion than currently. However in the short to medium term any effective VPN service must be able to deal with the technological and organisational heterogeneities that are present when providing a high level of service functionality over an arbitrary number of administrative domains. This paper presents the design of a management service for a VPN that addresses some of these multi-domain and network heterogeneity issues. It outlines how a design based on the ITU-T’s TMN recommendations was developed and how working prototypes were developed over a series of demonstration testbeds based on real broadband networks. (This work was partially funded by the Commission of the European Union as part of the PREPARE project under contract number RACE 2004)