IV-B Topology Management

  As outlined in section III-D, topology services manage topological relationships between managed objects. In this section, we describe first how a graphical representation of abstract objects bound to real resources might look like. This is necessary because (see section II) LEO/MEO satellites provide to a large extent telecommunication services (perceived as CORBA objects) that initially do not fit well into an object model for network resources as provided by SNMP-based management platforms. Another challenge comes from the high dynamics of satellite communications where not only the relationships between call connections and satellites may differ, but also the number of satellites bound to ground stations. Thus, new managed objects must be rapidly identified by a discovery task and the high frequency of changes requires regular topology updates.