As the Internet continues to grow, it becomes more and more apparent that existing Internet management technologies need to be improved, extended or replaced in order to extend functionality and reduce development time and operational costs. Within the IETF, IRTF, and IAB, several new approaches are currently under discussion. Evolutionary approaches aim at improving currently used technologies, whereas revolutionary approaches try to replace existing management-specific technologies with standard distributed systems technologies. This article surveys the research and development work under way to develop future Internet management technologies.
In this paper, we show how Web technologies can be used effectively to (i) address some of the deficiencies of traditional IP network management platforms, and (ii) render these expensive platforms redundant. We build on the concept of embedded management application, proposed by Wellens and Auerbach, and present two models of network management application designs that rely on Web technologies. First, the pull model is based on the request/response paradigm. It is typically used to perform data polling. Several commercial management platforms already use Web technologies that rely on this model to provide for ad hoc management; we demonstrate how to extend this to regular management. Second, the push model is a novel approach which relies on the publish/subscribe/distribute paradigm. It is better suited to regular management than the pull model, and allows administrators to conserve network bandwidth as well as CPU time on the management station. It can be seen as a generalization of the paradigm commonly used for notification delivery. Finally, we introduce the concept of the collapsed network management platform, where these two models coexist.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.