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XMLNET: An Architecture for Cost Effective Network Management Based on XML Technologies

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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.

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  1. Such a mechanism can be implemented using Xpath/XQuery based search engines (e.g., the Java based XQEngine).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors gracefully acknowledge F. Strauß and T. Klie for providing the source code of the SXG (Version 1.0) and mibdump.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Heroon Polytechneiou Street, Zografou, Greece

    Dimitris Alexopoulos

  2. Athens Information Technology, Markopoulo Avenue, Peania, Greece

    John Soldatos

  3. National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 9 Heroon Polytechneiou Street, GR-15773, Zografou, Greece

    Dimitris Alexopoulos

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  1. Dimitris Alexopoulos
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  2. John Soldatos
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Correspondence to Dimitris Alexopoulos.

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Dimitris Alexopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, in 1979. In 2002 he received the diploma of electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He has worked as software engineer for INTRACOM S.A and INTRASOFT INTERNATIONAL S.A. Since 2003 he is a PhD candidate and a research associate at the NTUA (Telecommunication Laboratory). His research interests are distributed and programmable network management, service oriented programming, grid computing and web services.

John K. Soldatos was born in Athens, Greece in 1973. He obtained his Dipl-Eng. degree in 1996 and his PhD in 2000, both from the National Technical University of Athens. He has had an active role in numerous EC funded research projects (ESPRIT, ACTS, IST, FP6). He has also consulted in many ICT projects for leading greek enterprises. He has co-authored more than 50 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings. Since March 2003 he is with AIT, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. His current research interests are in Network Control and Management, Grid, Ubiquitous and Autonomic Computing.

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Alexopoulos, D., Soldatos, J. XMLNET: An Architecture for Cost Effective Network Management Based on XML Technologies. J Netw Syst Manage 13, 451–477 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-005-9007-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-005-9007-4

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