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How does protocol mediation work?

A protocol mediation device rewrites your alarms to a format that's compatible with your SNMP or TL1 manager.

A communication protocol is just a format for encoding information - typically in the form of a data packet containing the payload data (the actual message) and a header (extra bits containing address and routing information specific to the protocol).

Protocol mediation works by putting a new header on the payload data. The protocol mediation device receives the alarm input, extracts the payload data, re-encodes the payload data in the format of another protocol, and forwards the re-encoded alarm to the alarm master.

For our purposes, this means taking an alarm in TABS, TBOS, etc., and converting it into an SNMP trap message or TL1 autonomous message. Contact closures, which aren't in the form of a framed protocol, are directly encoded as SNMP traps or TL1 autonomous messages.

The protocol mediation device knows how to do this because it has an internal database that relates one alarm protocol to another. (This is important, for reasons I'll explain on the next page.)

Those are the essentials of how protocol mediation works … but what kind of protocol mediation solution should you choose for your network?

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