Developer Guide

Developer Guide Overview

In this guide, we explore the use of Topology & Inventory to manage the topology and inventory data in your network.

Introducing topology and inventory data

Topology and inventory data is the information that represents entities in a telecommunications network and the relationships between them that provide insight into a particular aspect of the network of importance to specific use cases. Topology and inventory data can be derived from inventory, configuration, or other data. Topology & Inventory is being updated autonomously based on changes in the network.

Topology & Inventory supports several topology and inventory domains, see the Data Models for details on the topology and inventory model. The understanding of the model is important to enable a user making queries on topology and inventory data. The entities are modeled as managed objects (found under the schema in the data dictionary) and grouped together in modules based on functionality. See Supported domains for the list of the topology and inventory domains currently supported in Topology & Inventory capability.

Concepts

The building blocks of the Topology & Inventory are domains, entities, and the relationships between each other. From a graph perspective, entities are the vertices and relationships are the edges. These two components are part of a subgraph, or the so-called domain. A relationship can go beyond a single domain, since it can happen that the two entities come from two separate ones. In this particular case, they have a cross-domain relationship.

Domain

A domain is a grouping of topology and inventory entities that handles topology and inventory data. Topology and inventory data is the information that represents entities in a telecommunications network and the relationships between them that provides insight into a particular aspect of the network of import to specific use cases. Topology and inventory data can be derived from inventory, configuration, or other data. Therefore, the topology and inventory model must define what the telecoms network entities and relationships are. More information can be found in Supported domains. The Topology Exposure and Inventory Management (TEIV) domain is the parent domain used for entities and relationships. This domain can be used in reading and querying topology and inventory data when the domain name of an entity or relationship is not known.

Entity

Entities are enabling the modelling and storage of complex network infrastructure and relationships. The following are two examples of the entities and their attributes from Topology & Inventory Data Models.

Relationship

It is a bi-directional connection between two entities, one of which is the originating side (A-side) and the other is the terminating side (B-side). The order of the sides matters since it defines the relationship itself which must be unique. A relationship between two entities is based on the effect that one has on the other. An entity can have one or multiple relationships which can be defined by the user. A possible relationship between ManagedElement and ODUFunction can be MANAGEDELEMENT_MANAGES_ODUFUNCTION.

Consumer Data

Consumer data is data that enriches Topology & Inventory models. It can be attached to topology entity or topology relation instance, outside of the declared topology entity or topology relationship attributes.

Three types of consumer data are supported:

Source IDs (read only)
Classifiers (read and write)
Decorators (read and write)

For information about how consumer data relates to the Topology & Inventory model and how this information is encoded, see Topology & Inventory Data Models

Topology identifiers

These identifiers are uniquely generated values used to identify objects within Topology & Inventory.

NOTE: To maintain robust design principles, Apps must avoid caching or depending on topology identifiers (id), as these identifiers are assigned to entities and relationships for data organization purposes only. Topology identifiers carry no intrinsic meaning.

Apps must rely on sourceIds which is a list that contains the URN prefixed source identifiers of a topology object.

Metadata and reliability Indicator

Metadata provides additional information about entities and relationships within the database.

The reliabilityIndicator is used to indicate the status of the topology data within the network. See the Common YANG Types in the Topology & Inventory Data Models for more information. It is implemented as a name-value pair within the metadata column. It applies to every entity and relationship.

Values for reliabilityIndicator:

RESTORED: The data was restored from a backup and the responsible adapters are checking to ensure that the data is current.
OK: The data is in alignment with the source of truth, as far as Topology Exposure Handling is aware.
ADVISED: Entity implicitly created by Topology & Inventory Exposure Handling and potentially not aligned with the source of truth.

Topology & Inventory models

The Topology & Inventory objects are managed and standardized using YANG models. These YANG models describe managed network entities and their attributes, while also providing information on the relations between the network entities. YANG data models are structured into modules and submodules. Management instance data is a graph of objects which have attributes (see the schema in the data models).

The Topology & Inventory Data Models includes:

Modules for each supported domain that describe the structure of the managed objects within it as well as any relationships between them.

Modules that describe cross-domain relationships.

Modules that define proprietary extensions and types used to describe the structure of objects and attributes within the domains.

The following sample diagram shows some managed objects and their relationships in the RAN domain.

A direct relationship is a connection between two entities without any in-between entity and an indirect relationship contains at least one. NRCellDU has direct relationships with ODUFunction and NRSectorCarrier, while it also has indirect relationships with ManagedElement, AntennaCapability, and AntennaModule.

Supported domains

Domain	Description
RAN	This model contains the topology entities and relations in the RAN domain, which represents the functional capability of the deployed RAN that are relevant to rApps use cases.
EQUIPMENT	This model contains the topology entities and relations in the Equipment domain, which is modeled to understand the physical location of equipment such as antennas associated with a cell/carrier and their relevant properties, for example, tilt, max power, and so on.
OAM	This model contains the topology entities and relations in the O&M domain, which are intended to represent management systems and management interfaces.
CLOUD	This model contains the topology entities and relations in the RAN CLOUD domain, which comprises cloud infrastructure and deployment aspects that can be used in the topology model.
REL_EQUIPMENT_RAN	This model contains the topology relations between Equipment and RAN.
REL_OAM_RAN	This model contains the topology relations between O&M and RAN.
REL_CLOUD_RAN	This model contains the RAN Cloud to RAN Logical topology relations.
REL_OAM_CLOUD	This model contains the RAN O&M to Cloud topology relations.