The hardest problems of network management are frequently not modeling, abstracting, filtering, or propagation of management information; they are the extraction of management information from the resources being managed. This process is commonly referred to as the management instrumentation of resources. Although a variety of new systems are being designed and deployed on a continuous basis, it is still a rare occasion that these systems are designed and instrumented to be managed. We show how management instrumentation can be simply and powerfully accomplished if management provisions are made in the design of the managed resource. We look at digital television receivers and their Java applications as standardized by the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC). We model the applications lifecycle of these applications using the ITU-T X.731 State Management function, and outline the corresponding applications and management Java APIs.

It is argued that metacommunication, i.e. communication about communication rules, is a general integration methodology that is applicable to the integration of architectures, protocols, and systems. Efforts towards the development of an automated methodology for metacommunication are discussed. The author views metacommunication as a design problem. Metacommunicating entities exchange partially specified communication rules. Each entity, or a metacommunication center, applies a standard composition principle on the individual partially specified rules in order to derive the complete protocol architecture. A report is presented on an existing implementation of the metacommunication mechanism and on translators that transform the resulting specification into C code.>

The principal issues involved in porting networking software are discussed and solutions that have been used to implement a standard environment interface to encourage code portability are reported. This interface has been designed to provide a uniform environment to protocol drivers generated by the Archetype language compiler. The structure of the present implementation is outlined and issues relating to the environment interface are elaborated. The implementation provides both portable data representation and portable systems services.>

A method for the automated design, specification, and implementation of protocol architectures is introduced. A natural-language-like protocol architecture specification technique, called Archetype, is formulated. This technique aids the design by enabling an unambiguous specification of the protocol architecture on the level of the communications technologies used, without involvement in the complex implementation details of these technologies. The author defines a data-driven concurrent execution model and specifies the generation of executable specifications from abstract protocol architecture specifications. The exploitation of parallelism in the execution model enables the fulfilment of performance constraints placed on protocol architectures. An architecture based on a single X.25-level 3-like protocol is used as an illustrative example.>

A formal method is introduced for the development and definition of command languages for heterogeneous computer networks. The network command languages are developed from the command languages of the systems constituting the network. This is done by defining a common presentation model for the system command languages and constructing the network command language by applying a composition principle to the commonly represented languages. The common presentation model is defined as a Vienna Development Method (Meta IV) abstract processor for command languages. System command languages are represented by means of predicate functions which are defined on the abstract domains of the abstract processor. This allows a straightforward formulation of the composition principle as a function for the logical combination of predicate functions. Two sample network command languages are composed out of two hypothetical command languages. The results are related to the International Organization for Standardization Open Systems Interconnection model (ISO OSI).