Comparing Event Reporting Solutions for Autonomic Management

Abstract

The increasing complexity of current communication networks will greatly benefit from the deployment of autonomic monitoring and management architectures that allow the network to detect, diagnose and repair failures autonomously, adapt its configuration and optimize its performance and quality of service parameters. Knowing the potential of existing management technologies can help choosing the most appropriate solutions for specific network/services scenarios. As an illustrative solution, this paper proposes and evaluates a NETCONF (Network Configuration) agent for link-state monitoring, a fault-detection mechanism based on notifications. Then, a comparative study between different management technologies, in terms of their scope, flexibility and market adoption, will be conducted: by performing a series of tests on representative prototypes, the results obtained regarding different performance issues (like signaling overhead, memory requirements, coding efficiency and response times) are analyzed and compared in order to identify which solutions are more appropriate to be used on future autonomic network monitoring and management scenarios. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), the WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management) and WS-MAN (Web Services Management) web-based approaches and the NETCONF protocol are exhaustively tested and compared.