50 research outputs found
Distributed management: implementation issues
Management processes have to react on time to the
new challenges put by a crescent movement of the computing
world to the Internet paradigm. The enormous base of legacy
knowledge and legacy systems leads the SNMP management
framework to a necessary choice in nowadays management
scenarios. However, even with the recent SNMPv3, its services
correspond roughly to low-level operations for setting or
retrieving network equipment parameters. The IETF
Distributed Management working group have been producing
normalization documents that intent to apply to the
enrichment of SNMP semantics, especially in what concerns
the processing of management information.
This paper will present the recent outcome of this WG and
will discuss an implementation project that aims to apply
mobile agent technology in these scenarios
An SNMP filesystem in userspace
Modern computer networks are constantly increasing in size and complexity. Despite this, data networks are a critical factor for the success of many organizations. Monitoring their health and operation sta- tus is fundamental, and usually performed through specific network man- agement architectures, developed and standardized in the last decades. On the other hand, file systems have become one of the best well known paradigms of human-computer interaction, and have been around since early days in the personal computer industry. In this paper we propose a file system interface to network management information, allowing users to open, edit and visualize network and systems operation information
An ontology-driven architecture for data integration and management in home-based telemonitoring scenarios
The shift from traditional medical care to the use of new technology and engineering innovations is nowadays an interesting and growing research area mainly motivated by a growing population with chronic conditions and disabilities. By means of information and communications technologies (ICTs), telemedicine systems offer a good solution for providing medical care at a distance to any person in any place at any time. Although significant contributions have been made in this field in recent decades, telemedicine and in e-health scenarios in general still pose numerous challenges that need to be addressed by researchers in order to take maximum advantage of the benefits that these systems provide and to support their long-term implementation. The goal of this research thesis is to make contributions in the field of home-based telemonitoring scenarios. By periodically collecting patients' clinical data and transferring them to physicians located in remote sites, patient health status supervision and feedback provision is possible. This type of telemedicine system guarantees patient supervision while reducing costs (enabling more autonomous patient care and avoiding hospital over flows). Furthermore, patients' quality of life and empowerment are improved. Specifically, this research investigates how a new architecture based on ontologies can be successfully used to address the main challenges presented in home-based telemonitoring scenarios. The challenges include data integration, personalized care, multi-chronic conditions, clinical and technical management. These are the principal issues presented and discussed in this thesis. The proposed new ontology-based architecture takes into account both practical and conceptual integration issues and the transference of data between the end points of the telemonitoring scenario (i.e, communication and message exchange). The architecture includes two layers: 1) a conceptual layer and 2) a data and communication layer. On the one hand, the conceptual layer based on ontologies is proposed to unify the management procedure and integrate incoming data from all the sources involved in the telemonitoring process. On the other hand, the data and communication layer based on web service technologies is proposed to provide practical back-up to the use of the ontology, to provide a real implementation of the tasks it describes and thus to provide a means of exchanging data. This architecture takes advantage of the combination of ontologies, rules, web services and the autonomic computing paradigm. All are well-known technologies and popular solutions applied in the semantic web domain and network management field. A review of these technologies and related works that have made use of them is presented in this thesis in order to understand how they can be combined successfully to provide a solution for telemonitoring scenarios. The design and development of the ontology used in the conceptual layer led to the study of the autonomic computing paradigm and its combination with ontologies. In addition, the OWL (Ontology Web Language) language was studied and selected to express the required knowledge in the ontology while the SPARQL language was examined for its effective use in defining rules. As an outcome of these research tasks, the HOTMES (Home Ontology for Integrated Management in Telemonitoring Scenarios) ontology, presented in this thesis, was developed. The combination of the HOTMES ontology with SPARQL rules to provide a flexible solution for personalising management tasks and adapting the methodology for different management purposes is also discussed. The use of Web Services (WSs) was investigated to support the exchange of information defined in the conceptual layer of the architecture. A generic ontology based solution was designed to integrate data and management procedures in the data and communication layer of the architecture. This is an innovative REST-inspired architecture that allows information contained in an ontology to be exchanged in a generic manner. This layer structure and its communication method provide the approach with scalability and re-usability features. The application of the HOTMES-based architecture has been studied for clinical purposes following three simple methodological stages described in this thesis. Data and management integration for context-aware and personalized monitoring services for patients with chronic conditions in the telemonitoring scenario are thus addressed. In particular, the extension of the HOTMES ontology defines a patient profile. These profiles in combination with individual rules provide clinical guidelines aiming to monitor and evaluate the evolution of the patient's health status evolution. This research implied a multi-disciplinary collaboration where clinicians had an essential role both in the ontology definition and in the validation of the proposed approach. Patient profiles were defined for 16 types of different diseases. Finally, two solutions were explored and compared in this thesis to address the remote technical management of all devices that comprise the telemonitoring scenario. The first solution was based on the HOTMES ontology-based architecture. The second solution was based on the most popular TCP/IP management architecture, SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). As a general conclusion, it has been demonstrated that the combination of ontologies, rules, WSs and the autonomic computing paradigm takes advantage of the main benefits that these technologies can offer in terms of knowledge representation, work flow organization, data transference, personalization of services and self-management capabilities. It has been proven that ontologies can be successfully used to provide clear descriptions of managed data (both clinical and technical) and ways of managing such information. This represents a further step towards the possibility of establishing more effective home-based telemonitoring systems and thus improving the remote care of patients with chronic diseases
A Generic Network and System Management Framework
Networks and distributed systems have formed the basis of an ongoing communications revolution
that has led to the genesis of a wide variety of services. The constantly increasing size and
complexity of these systems does not come without problems. In some organisations, the
deployment of Information Technology has reached a state where the benefits from downsizing and
rightsizing by adding new services are undermined by the effort required to keep the system
running.
Management of networks and distributed systems in general has a straightforward goal: to provide
a productive environment in which work can be performed effectively. The work required for
management should be a small fraction of the total effort. Most IT systems are still managed in an
ad hoc style without any carefully elaborated plan. In such an environment the success of
management decisions depends totally on the qualification and knowledge of the administrator.
The thesis provides an analysis of the state of the art in the area of Network and System
Management and identifies the key requirements that must be addressed for the provisioning of
Integrated Management Services. These include the integration of the different management related
aspects (i.e. integration of heterogeneous Network, System and Service Management).
The thesis then proposes a new framework, INSMware, for the provision of Management Services.
It provides a fundamental basis for the realisation of a new approach to Network and System
Management. It is argued that Management Systems can be derived from a set of pre-fabricated
and reusable Building Blocks that break up the required functionality into a number of separate
entities rather than being developed from scratch. It proposes a high-level logical model in order to
accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Network and
System Management that can be used as a reference model.
A development methodology is introduced that reflects principles of the proposed approach, and
provides guidelines to structure the analysis, design and implementation phases of a management
system. The INSMware approach can further be combined with the componentware paradigm for
the implementation of the management system. Based on these principles, a prototype for the
management of SNMP systems has been implemented using industry standard middleware
technologies. It is argued that development of a management system based on Componentware
principles can offer a number of benefits. INSMware Components may be re-used and system
solutions will become more modular and thereby easier to construct and maintain
Distributed control of reconfigurable mobile network agents for resource coordination
Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.Considering the tremendous growth of internet applications and network resource federation proposed towards future open access network (FOAN), the need to analyze the robustness of the classical signalling mechanisms across multiple network operators cannot be over-emphasized. It is envisaged, there will be additional challenges in meeting the bandwidth requirements and network management...The first objective of this project is to describe the networking environment based on the support for heterogeneity of network components..
A mid-level framework for independent network services configuration management
Tese doutoramento do Programa Doutoral em TelecomunicaçÔesDecades of evolution in communication networkâs resulted in a high diversity of solutions,
not only in terms of network elements but also in terms of the way they are managed.
From a management perspective, having heterogeneous elements was a feasible scenario
over the last decades, where management activities were mostly considered as additional
features. However, with the most recent advances on network technology, that includes
proposals for future Internet as well as requirements for automation, scale and efficiency,
new management methods are required and integrated network management became an
essential issue.
Most recent solutions aiming to integrate the management of heterogeneous network
elements, rely on the application of semantic data translations to obtain a common representation
between heterogeneous managed elements, thus enabling their management
integration. However, the realization of semantic translations is very complex to be effectively
achieved, requiring extensive processing of data to find equivalent representation,
besides requiring the administratorâs intervention to create and validate conversions,
since contemporary data models lack a formal semantic representation.
From these constrains a research question arose: Is it possible to integrate the con g-
uration management of heterogeneous network elements overcoming the use of manage-
ment translations? In this thesis the author uses a network service abstraction to propose
a framework for network service management, which comprehends the two essential management
operations: monitoring and configuring. This thesis focus on describing and
experimenting the subsystem responsible for the network services configurations management,
named Mid-level Network Service Configuration (MiNSC), being the thesis
most important contribution.
The MiNSC subsystem proposes a new configuration management interface for integrated
network service management based on standard technologies that includes an
universal information model implemented on unique data models. This overcomes the
use of management translations while providing advanced management functionalities,
only available in more advanced research projects, that includes scalability and resilience
improvement methods. Such functionalities are provided by using a two-layer distributed
architecture, as well as over-provisioning of network elements. To demonstrate MiNSCâs
management capabilities, a group of experiments was conducted, that included, configuration
deployment, instance migration and expansion using a DNS management system
as test bed. Since MiNSC represents a new architectural approach, with no direct reference for
a quantitative evaluation, a theoretical analysis was conducted in order to evaluate it
against important integrated network management perspectives. It was concluded that
there is a tendency to apply management translations, being the most straightforward solution
when integrating the management of heterogeneous management interfaces and/or
data models. However, management translations are very complex to be realized, being
its effectiveness questionable for highly heterogeneous environments. The implementation
of MiNSCâs standard configuration management interface provides a simplified
perspective that, by using universal configurations, removes translations from the management
system. Its distributed architecture uses independent/universal configurations
and over-provisioning of network elements to improve the serviceâs resilience and scalability,
enabling as well a more efficient resource management by dynamically allocating
resources as needed
Mesh-Mon: a Monitoring and Management System for Wireless Mesh Networks
A mesh network is a network of wireless routers that employ multi-hop routing and can be used to provide network access for mobile clients. Mobile mesh networks can be deployed rapidly to provide an alternate communication infrastructure for emergency response operations in areas with limited or damaged infrastructure. In this dissertation, we present Dart-Mesh: a Linux-based layer-3 dual-radio two-tiered mesh network that provides complete 802.11b coverage in the Sudikoff Lab for Computer Science at Dartmouth College. We faced several challenges in building, testing, monitoring and managing this network. These challenges motivated us to design and implement Mesh-Mon, a network monitoring system to aid system administrators in the management of a mobile mesh network. Mesh-Mon is a scalable, distributed and decentralized management system in which mesh nodes cooperate in a proactive manner to help detect, diagnose and resolve network problems automatically. Mesh-Mon is independent of the routing protocol used by the mesh routing layer and can function even if the routing protocol fails. We demonstrate this feature by running Mesh-Mon on two versions of Dart-Mesh, one running on AODV (a reactive mesh routing protocol) and the second running on OLSR (a proactive mesh routing protocol) in separate experiments. Mobility can cause links to break, leading to disconnected partitions. We identify critical nodes in the network, whose failure may cause a partition. We introduce two new metrics based on social-network analysis: the Localized Bridging Centrality (LBC) metric and the Localized Load-aware Bridging Centrality (LLBC) metric, that can identify critical nodes efficiently and in a fully distributed manner. We run a monitoring component on client nodes, called Mesh-Mon-Ami, which also assists Mesh-Mon nodes in the dissemination of management information between physically disconnected partitions, by acting as carriers for management data. We conclude, from our experimental evaluation on our 16-node Dart-Mesh testbed, that our system solves several management challenges in a scalable manner, and is a useful and effective tool for monitoring and managing real-world mesh networks
A heterogeneous network management approach to wireless sensor networks in personal healthcare environments
University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Science.Many countries are facing problems caused by a rapid surge in
numbers of people over sixty-five. This aging population cohort will
place a strain on the existing health systems because the elderly are
prone to falls, chronic illnesses, dementia and general frailty. At the
same time governments are struggling to attract more people into the
health systems and there are already shortages of qualified nurses and
care givers.
This thesis represents a multi disciplinary approach to trying to solve
some of the above issues. In the first instance the researcher has
established the validity of the health crisis and then examined ways in
which Information Technology could help to alleviate some of the
issues. The nascent technology called Wireless Sensor Networks was
examined as a way of providing remote health monitoring for the
elderly, the infirm and the ill. The researcher postulated that Network
Management models and tools that are used to monitor huge networks
of computers could be adapted to monitor the health of persons in
their own homes, in aged care facilities and hospitals.
Wireless Sensor Network (WNS) Personal Healthcare can monitor such
vital signs as a patientâs temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen
level. WSNs (often referred to as Motes) use wireless transceivers that
can do remote sensing. The researcher aimed to assist all stakeholders
in the personal healthcare arena to use WSNs to improve monitoring.
The researcher provided a solution architecture and framework for
healthcare sensor monitoring systems, based on network management
techniques. This architecture generalises to heterogeneous and
autonomous data acquisition systems.
Future directions from this research point towards new areas of
knowledge from the development or creation of new technologies to
support the exponential growth of ubiquitous, just-in-time WSN health
informational services and applications such as the preventive and
proactive personal care health management and services around it.
The affordable and ubiquitous distributed access to remote personal
health care technologies in the future could have an important impact
in the society, by allowing the individuals to take immediate preventive
actions over their overall health condition. These systems could
potentially prevent death as well as improve national health budgets
by limiting costly medical interventions that could have been avoided
by individual, easy-action early prevention