On the use of mobility in distributed network management

Information Technology has been under unprecedented transformations and it is dramatically changing the way of work inside organizations. Information management systems must be adequate to cope with the profound effects of this evolution, which expectations includes the introduction into the networks of enormous quantities of different elements. Mobile agent paradigm seems to be, for many researchers, the right solution to deal with the pressures of these new demands. This paper discuss the issues around mobility of code on network management environments and presents ongoing work that provides mobility capability to distributed managers upon recent work of IETF’s Disman working group

Distributed management based on mobile agents

During the forthcoming years, Internet-based concepts will continue to revolutionize, in an unpredictable way, the mode enterprises provide, maintain and use traditional information technology. Management systems will be a crucial issue in the struggle with this crescent complexity. However, new requirements have to be considered, due to the expectation of enormous quantities of different elements, ranging from an impressive network bandwidth availability to multimedia QoS-constrained services. Many researchers believe that mobile agent paradigm can provide effective solutions on these new scenarios. This paper presents an implementation of management applications supported upon distribution and delegation concepts. For that it uses the current work of IETF’s Disman working group enhanced with mobility provision. The mobility allows the distributed managers to adapt dynamically to a mutable environment optimizing the use of network resources

Multi-management schemes for MAF platforms

Due to the crescent complexity of networks and systems, network management solutions are being pushed towards more distributed and cooperative models. Several specifications promoted by the IETF DISMAN charter already allow strong distribution of management tasks. Unfortunately, they are not adequate to achieve cooperative models. According to recent research, mobile agents provide a good platform to back cooperative models but several lacks are still identified - interoperability between different platforms and SNMP integration. Based on Mobile Agent Facility specification from the OMG, we propose a MIB to better integrate mobile agent models into SNMP frameworks and a GUI tool to monitor and control mobile agents platforms

A web services based framework for efficient monitoring and event reporting.

Network and Service Management (NSM) is a research discipline with significant research contributions the last 25 years. Despite the numerous standardised solutions that have been proposed for NSM, the quest for an "all encompassing technology" still continues. A new technology introduced lately to address NSM problems is Web Services (WS). Despite the research effort put into WS and their potential for addressing NSM objectives, there are efficiency, interoperability, etc issues that need to be solved before using WS for NSM. This thesis looks at two techniques to increase the efficiency of WS management applications so that the latter can be used for efficient monitoring and event reporting. The first is a query tool we built that can be used for efficient retrieval of management state data close to the devices where they are hosted. The second technique is policies used to delegate a number of tasks from a manager to an agent to make WS-based event reporting systems more efficient. We tested the performance of these mechanisms by incorporating them in a custom monitoring and event reporting framework and supporting systems we have built, against other similar mechanisms (XPath) that have been proposed for the same tasks, as well as previous technologies such as SNMP. Through these tests we have shown that these mechanisms are capable of allowing us to use WS efficiently in various monitoring and event reporting scenarios. Having shown the potential of our techniques we also present the design and implementation challenges for building a GUI tool to support and enhance the above systems with extra capabilities. In summary, we expect that other problems WS face will be solved in the near future, making WS a capable platform for it to be used for NSM

Agents in Network Management

The ubiquity and complexity of modern networks require automated management and control. With increases in scale, automated solutions based on simple data access models such as SNMP will give way to more distributed and algorithmic techniques. This article outlines present and near-term solutions based on the ideas of active networks and mobile agents, which permit sophisticated programmable control and management of ultra large scale networks

The generic context sharing protocol GCSP : Application to signaling in a cross-network and multi-provider environment

This paper proposes a new signaling paradigm and a new signaling protocol called the Generic Context Sharing Protocol (GCSP) for the construction of a global control plane over present and future communication networks. After identifying the special nature of the control plane software involved in the setup of a conversational service instance it examines the various mechanisms for information sharing which leads to our new proposal. We show that this new data-based protocol is better suited to control plane requirements than the present day’s command-oriented signaling mechanisms. We indicate the basic principles of the protocol and we give a brief description of the generic context. We show the place of this proposal in the present day research efforts and we mention a practical implementation case.8th IFIP/IEEE International conference on Mobile and Wireless CommunicationRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Results of the CEO Project - WWW Management

This report contains the result of a ‘proof of concept’ study that was performed by the CTIT of the University of Twente, together with ESYS Limited (Guildford, UK) for the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EC (Ispra, Italy). The study is part of the ‘Centre of Earth Observation’ (CEO) programme. The subject of the study was the design and implementation of tools that allow status and utilisation monitoring of networks and distributed information servers. In the specific case of the CEO programme, these information servers are accessible via the WWW and contain large amounts of earth observation data (e.g. satellite pictures). The work division within the project was that ESYS investigated the management applications, which had to run on top of HP-Openview, and the CTIT designed and implemented the management agents. These agents had to include the following Management Information Bases (MIBs): • A HTTP-MIB, with detailed information concerning the WWW document transfer protocol. • A Retrieval Service (RS) MIB, with high level information concerning the WWW document transfer service. • An Information Store (IS) MIB, with information concerning the WWW server and the documents provided by that server. The specifications of these MIBs were presented to the IETF and provided a good starting point for subsequent standardization activities. The agents were implemented as sub-agents of the EMANATE extensible agent package and are currently being tested in a number of field trials