Annotated Typology of Distributed Network Management Paradigms

Over the past few years, network management has steadily evolved from a centralized model, where all the management processing takes place on a single network management station, to distributed models, where management is distributed over a number, potentially large, of nodes. Among distributed models, one, the weakly distributed hierarchical model, has been around for several years, whereas a flurry of new ones, based on mobile code, distributed objects or cooperative agents, have only recently emerged. Which of these techniques will eventually win ? Will several ones have to coexist ? How do they compare to each other ? In order to provide a framework to analyze these issues, this paper presents a comprehensive typology of all network management paradigms known to date, whether they have been successfully implemented already or whether they are still confined to the research community. By comparing these models with those used in another research field, enterprise management, we delineate a common trend of evolution, and attempt to predict what the future holds for network management. Keywords : Distributed Network Management, Organizational Models, Mobile Code, Management by Delegation, Distributed Objects, Intelligent Agents

A Survey of Distributed Network and Systems Management Paradigms

Since the mid 1990s, network and systems management has steadily evolved from a centralized paradigm, where all the management processing takes place in a single management station, to distributed paradigms, where management is distributed over a potentially large number of nodes. Some of these paradigms, epitomized by the SNMPv2 and CMIP protocols, have been around for several years, whereas a flurry of new ones, based on mobile code, distributed objects or intelligent agents, only recently emerged. The goal of this survey is to classify all major network and systems management paradigms known to date, in order to help network and systems administrators design a management application. In the first part of the survey, we present a simple typology, based on a single criterion: the organizational model. In this typology, all paradigms are grouped into four types: centralized paradigms, weakly distributed hierarchical paradigms, strongly distributed hierarchical paradigms and cooperative paradigms. In the second part of the survey, we gradually build an enhanced typology, based on four criteria: delegation granularity, semantic richness of the information model, degree of specification of a task, and degree of automation of management. Finally, we show how to use our typologies to select a management paradigm in a given context. KEYWORDS Distributed Network Management, Distributed Systems Management, Integrated Management, Mobile Code, Distributed Objects, Intelligent Agents, Typology

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

Developing a generic network planning interface

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this documentDissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2007.Computer Scienceunrestricte

Converting CORBA Based Fault Management to SNMP

Vianhallinta pitää sisällään toimia, joilla havaitaan, eristetään ja korjataan tietoliikenneverkon epänormaaleja toimintoja. ITU-T:n tietoliikenteen hallintaverkkoarkkitehtuuri koostuu viidestä tasosta, joista kaksi alimmaista, elementinhallintataso sekä verkkoelementtitaso, keskittyvät verkkoelementtien hallintaan. Useita protokollia on hyödynnetty vianhallintaan näillä tasoilla. CORBA-pohjainen vianhallinta on ollut yleinen 3GPP:n ratkaisusarjaa hyödyntävissä verkkoelementeissä ja elementinhallintajärjestelmissä. Mutta tietoliikenneteollisuuden siirtyessä kohti all-IP-maailmaa, SNMP on jälleen uudelleen vahvistamassa asemaansa hallitsevana verkkoelementtien monitorointiprotokollana. Täten verkkonsa vianhallinnan yhdenmukaistamista tutkiva verkko-operaattori voisi harkita CORBA-pohjaisten verkkoelementtiensä konvertointia käyttämään SNMP:tä. Tämä työ tutkii tämänkaltaisen konversion edellytyksiä ja yksityiskohtia. Kirjallisuustutkimuksella otetaan selvää vianhallinnan eri puolista ja vertaillaan CORBA:a ja SNMP:tä konvertterin suunnittelua varten. Todiste konversiokonseptin toimivuudesta saadaan yksinkertaistetun implementaation avulla. Implementaatio osoittaa konvertterin olevan melko helposti rakennettavissa, ja että konvertteri voi toimia joko CORBA:n tai SNMP:n toimintaperiaatteella. Konvertteri mahdollistaa vianhallinnan yhdenmukaistamisen lisäämättä huomattavaa viivettä, rasitusta kaistaleveyskäytölle tai kuluttamatta runsaasti muistiresursseja. Tämän työn tulokset antavat aihetta esitettyjen konseptien laajemmalle tutkimukselle, sekä konvertterin laajentamiselle kattamaan konfiguraation hallinnan. Tähän tosin SNMP ei ehkä ole suositelluin protokolla.Fault management involves tasks to enable the detection, isolation and correction of abnormal operation of the telecommunication network. Telecommunications management network architecture of ITU-T consists of five layers, of which the bottom two, the element management layer and the network element layer, are focused on the management of network elements. For fault management tasks at these layers, several protocols have been utilised. CORBA based fault management has been common in network elements and element management systems utilising solution sets of 3GPP. But as the telecommunications industry moves towards an all-IP world, SNMP has yet again become the predominant protocol for monitoring network elements. A network operator looking into unifying the fault management of its network could consider converting the CORBA based network element to using SNMP. This thesis studies the requirements and details of this kind of conversion. With a literary study, aspects of fault management and comparison of CORBA and SNMP are scoped for designing a CORBA-SNMP converter. A proof of concept for the conversion is obtained with a simplified implementation. The implementation shows that a converter is quite easy to construct, and the converter can perform with operating principle of either CORBA or SNMP. The converter is also able to provide fault management unification without adding considerable delay, strain on bandwidth usage or consuming memory resources. The results of this thesis give grounds for studying the proposed concepts further and also broaden the converter to cover configuration management. Though for configuration management SNMP may not be the preferred protocol

Conception et réalisation d'une application de gestion de réseau à base de composants répartis

Les applications actuelles de gestion des réseaux reposent essentiellement sur l'approche centralisée. Cependant, cette approche a atteint ses limites. Elle ne répond plus aux nouvelles exigences, telles que la tolérance aux fautes, la flexibilité et l'expansibilité des applications de gestion. Pour répondre à ces nouveaux besoins, plusieurs approches décentralisées ont été développées; elles consistent à répartir des tâches de gestion sur plusieurs entités du réseau. Ce mémoire propose une nouvelle approche décentralisée dans laquelle nous abordons le problème d'intégration dynamique de nouvelles fonctions à l'application de gestion, en utilisant les composants répartis et l'environnement distribué Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Actuellement, il n'existe pas d'application de gestion capable de détecter et d'intégrer, au cours de son exécution, de nouvelles fonctions de gestion. Nous avons donc développé une architecture décentralisée afin d'illustrer le développement de ce type d'application. Cette architecture est constituée de composants répartis qui utilisent la technologie CORBA pour communiquer entre eux. Ces composants accèdent aux informations de gestion des ressources du réseau à travers une passerelle CORBA/SNMP. L'architecture définit des agents CORBA pour représenter les ressources à gérer sur le réseau et définit des composants CORBA pour représenter les fonctions de gestion de réseau. Ces entités (composants CORBA) peuvent être branchées sur le réseau au cours de l'exécution de l'application de gestion qui les détecte et les utilise automatiquement. Ce mécanisme est appelé plug and play. Nous avons développé notre architecture sur une plate-forme Windows NT en utilisant le langage Java 1.2, l'API SNMP de AdventNet, le service de nom de Java 1.2 et OrbixWeb d'IONA

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

Software agents in network management

The globalisation of Internet technology had a strong impact on technology price and availability, which resulted in the emerging of more opportunities and more services in distance learning, electronic commerce, multimedia and many others. From the user perspective, there is a need for more comprehensive interfaces. From the network perspective, the introduction of QoS and the upcoming of new and more complex services led to additional bandwidth and management requirements. The amount of management information produced by applications, workstations, servers and all kind of network components is increasingly hard to process. All this information can be filtered by an intelligent network management system, capable of proactive management. This paper intents to highlight the role of newer paradigms, such as Software Agents, in Network Management frameworks. The use of intelligent programs that substitutes the user in boring, repetitive or information intensive tasks can help in the resolution of problems such as congestion, reliability, real-time response and many others

Managing Next Generation Networks (NGNs) based on the Service-Oriented Architechture (SOA). Design, Development and testing of a message-based Network Management platform for the integration of heterogeneous management systems.

Next Generation Networks (NGNs) aim to provide a unified network infrastructure to offer multimedia data and telecommunication services through IP convergence. NGNs utilize multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies, creating a converged packet-switched network infrastructure, where service-related functions are separated from the transport functions. This requires significant changes in the way how networks are managed to handle the complexity and heterogeneity of NGNs. This thesis proposes a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based management framework that integrates heterogeneous management systems in a loose coupling manner. The key benefit of the proposed management architecture is the reduction of the complexity through service and data integration. A network management middleware layer that merges low level management functionality with higher level management operations to resolve the problem of heterogeneity was proposed. A prototype was implemented using Web Services and a testbed was developed using trouble ticket systems as the management application to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed framework. Test results show the correcting functioning of the system. It also concludes that the proposed framework fulfils the principles behind the SOA philosophy

Gestion et localisation de ressources sur un assistant numérique personnel

Ce mémoire traite les problèmes liés à la gestion et à la localisation de services sur un assistant numérique personnel (ANP). La localisation de services permet aux applications de découvrir les ressources d'un réseau offrant les services qu'elles ont spécifiés. Par le fait même, la localisation de services rend possible la configuration dynamique des applications afin qu'elles utilisent les ressources du réseau auquel l'ANP est connecté. Des protocoles de localisation de services existent pour accomplir cette tâche, mais ils ne sont pas disponibles pour les ANP. La recherche qui fait l'objet de ce mémoire a conduit à la réalisation d'un système de gestion et de localisation de services pour un ANP. Ce système permet la spécification, la localisation et l'utilisation de services d'un réseau à partir d'un ANP. Il permet également la configuration dynamique des applications qui utilisent les services. L'architecture de ce système est distribuée. Les ressources sont accessibles via les composants répartis de CORBA. Cette approche rend les clients indépendants de l'implantation des services offerts par les ressources. Elle permet d'uniformiser des interfaces pour l'accès aux ressources