Tactical network management for preserving the QoS: an implementation for an industrial local network

The purpose of this paper is to introduce new concepts to construct tactical network management. In fact, the main concerns in today´s network management is how to be able to analyse large amounts of information, give appropriate diagnostics, and try to evaluate and preserve the QoS offered by a system. To do this, threshold values must be set according to a certain concluded QoS. When these values are exceeded, alarms are sent to specific managers. This paper shows how to provide the relevant information to the right manager at the right time. The major contribution of our work is to provide network managers with conceptual supporting tools to find the important information that can help with the diagnostics, and that specifies the responsibilities of every entity in not providing the service or providing a depreciated service. The conceptual tools that we propose are: the QoS Model, the abstraction of the resources, and the level of visibility. We will show the benefit of studying the system behaviour closely to select the important information to be monitored, and splitting the system into different management levels to designate hierarchical managers. The emphasis is on the comprehension of the behaviour of every component of the system, on how to prepare the diagnostic and deduce the appropriate tactical action. This will automate a part of the decision process, and give the network manager support tools to his work