Initial service management architecture

This document describes D2.2 of the Internet Next Generation project. Internet Next Generation is a project performed within the context of the Gigaport programme, and is funded by many organizations within the Netherlands. The architecture that is described within this document explains how customers of a Differentiated Services (DiffServ) network can manage the service that is provided by them, by reading and modifying QoS parameters in an interactive way. Which parameters are available and which values these parameters can take, is defined in the Service Level Specification (SLS), which is part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The form of management in which customers can modify the behaviour of the provided service is called Customer Service Management (CSM); the idea that customers can manage the behaviour of the provided service is not only interesting in case of DiffServ, but also in cases like Mobile IP, IP security or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The scope of this deliverable is restricted to QoS management in a DiffServ environment; a subsequent deliverable will extend this work and address how service .management can be performed in other environments, like IntServ / RSVP. This new deliverable will also address the problem of inter domain management

Multi-Agent Based Network Monitoring and Management using Jade

The most difficult area in any implementation of a successful network is the monitoring and maintenance of such a network.  The network management solutions available today use the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which uses a centralized management approach. The drawbacks of such an implementation over-weigh the advantages . SNMP provides excellent statistics on the macro level but does not provide the level of details that is often required to completely resolve many network issues . Unlike SNMP the Multi Agent System (MAS) works in a distributed computing paradigm. This paper discusses a MAS solution to certain real world requirements of any network administrator. A real world problem domain is also discussed. Keywords: SNMP , MAS , Network monitoring

An entity access control model for network services management

The Network Services Management Framework tries to overcome the most important limitations of present network management frameworks, namely the most widely supported framework – the Internet Network Management Framework – by defining a management framework using a network services management distributed architecture that provides services management functions with any desired level of functionality. This document introduces one of the most important parts of this framework, the Entity Access Control Model and the mechanisms needed to its deployment: management entities and management domains, entity access and resources control management, and security mechanisms (authentication, data integrity verification, confidentiality and non-repudiation assurances). This model, although originally developed to be integrated on the Network Services Management Framework, can be completely integrated or partially adopted by other frameworks since it supports a wide range of conceptual and functional requisites recognised to be fundamental to the future of modern distributed network management frameworks

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

Real-time detection of grid bulk transfer traffic

The current practice of physical science research has yielded a continuously growing demand for interconnection network bandwidth to support the sharing of large datasets. Academic research networks and internet service providers have provisioned their networks to handle this type of load, which generates prolonged, high-volume traffic between nodes on the network. Maintenance of QoS for all network users demands that the onset of these (Grid bulk) transfers be detected to enable them to be reengineered through resources specifically provisioned to handle this type of traffic. This paper describes a real-time detector that operates at full-line-rate on Gb/s links, operates at high connection rates, and can track the use of ephemeral or non-standard ports