by Alexopoulos, Dimitris; Soldatos, John

XML technologies have been recently introduced in network management towards alleviating limitations of SNMP. The XML W3C standard, along with XML technologies has the potential to boost open, interoperable, cost-effective and standards-based management solutions. This paper highlights recent efforts towards XML network management and introduces an architecture supporting XML-based network management applications. This architecture specifies a runtime environment that parses XML documents containing composite operations for individual devices, as well as for heterogeneous mutli-vendor networks. Management operations in the scope of XML documents are defined in a programmable fashion based on an XML-based composition language supporting aggregations of elementary operations, looping commands, conditional statements, as well as simple rules signifying the occurrence of specific events. The introduced environment allows network managers to define management operations featuring high-level semantics and accordingly produce sophisticated applications through XML authoring. Following the illustration of the architecture, its composition language and issues relating to security and error handling, the paper ends up presenting a prototype implementation, along with associated performance evaluation results.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-005-9007-4
Online Date: 11/16/2005
Print publication date: 12/1/2005
View article on SpringerLink

by Burchard, Lars-Olof

In general, two types of resource reservations in computer networks can be distinguished: immediate reservations which are made in a just-in-time manner and advance reservations, i.e., the reservation of resources a long time before they are actually used. Advance reservations are essential for Grid computing but can also be useful for a variety of other applications that require network quality-of-service (QoS), such as content distribution networks with large amounts of content that must be distributed among the servers in a timely fashion. With the emerged MPLS standard and its explicit routing features, it is possible to overcome the unpredictable routing behavior which has so far prevented the implementation of advance reservation services. In this paper, additional opportunities are described that arise for network operators and customers with the implementation of advance reservations in computer networks. This includes the search for suitable transmission intervals or transmission rates. Furthermore, network operators can use the additional knowledge about future network status in order to improve the performance of the network. This paper discusses these issues and describes the software architecture of a management system that implements the previously mentioned services and optimization mechanisms. The paper is complemented with a performance evaluation of the management architecture, focused on the benefit for clients and operators.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-005-9004-7
Online Date: 11/16/2005
Print publication date: 12/1/2005
View article on SpringerLink

by Badonnel, Remi; State, Radu; Festor, Olivier; Schaff, Andre

Mobile ad-hoc networks are networks spontaneously deployed from a set of mobile devices without requiring any fixed infrastructures. The increasing interest in this technology raises new research challenges towards providing them a management framework. Network users expect a service level as close as in regular fixed networks. A primary expectation is the capability to communicate (end-to-end) with the other network users. We present in this paper a framework for monitoring and optimizing this capability in mobile ad-hoc networks. Our normalized metric, called end-to-end connectivity degree, characterizes the number of nodes, that a node can reach in the entire network. We describe a management architecture to monitor this metric together with the network density, and illustrate how routing configuration can be performed to optimize it.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-005-9008-3
Online Date: 11/15/2005
Print publication date: 12/1/2005
View article on SpringerLink

by Laouamri, Oussama; Aktouf, Chouki

This work proposes an adaptation of classical network management protocols for the purpose of a deep testing and management of network-based electronic systems such as routers, switches, and personal computers. The basic idea of this work is to extrapolate the advantages of network management functions (monitoring, control, test…) to the level of an electronic device. To this end, the proposed approach starts very early in the design process of integrated circuits where the concept of managed integrated circuit is introduced. A widely known design-for-test (DFT) technique is extended to render it useful through classical TCP/IP networks. The suggested solution is described and its efficiency is illustrated through extensive experimentations.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-005-9001-x
Online Date: 11/15/2005
Print publication date: 12/1/2005
View article on SpringerLink

by Bhole, Yogesh; Popescu, Adrian

The usage of Internet is rapidly increasing and a large part of the Internet traffic is generated by the World Wide Web (WWW) and the associated protocol HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Several important parameters that affect the performance of the WWW are bandwidth, scalability, and latency. To tackle these parameters and to improve the overall performance of the system, it is important to understand and to characterize the application level characteristics. This article is reporting on the measurement and analysis of HTTP traffic collected on the student access network at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. The analysis is done on various HTTP traffic parameters, e.g., inter-session timings, inter-arrival timings, request message sizes, response code, and number of transactions. The reported results can be useful for building synthetic workloads for simulation and benchmarking purposes.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-005-9000-y
Online Date: 11/15/2005
Print publication date: 12/1/2005
View article on SpringerLink