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Scalable Network Management Using Lightweight Programmable Network Services

  • Management of Active and Programmable Networks
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Although the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has proven to be a powerful tool for network administrators, it is widely accepted that SNMP does not offer the scalability or the functionality needed to manage large systems of routers and end systems. Active/programmable networks and mobile agent systems have been proposed as alternative network management solutions, offering new functionality and better scalability. Unfortunately, the flexibility and programmability of these (heavyweight) systems comes with its own set of problems, which has prevented them from becoming widely adopted.

This paper presents an ultra-lightweight programmable network service called ephemeral state processing (ESP) that can be used to efficiently monitor and collect information from large-scale networks. Although the service offers a limited set of features, the building blocks it does offer can be combined in novel ways to solve a wide range of network management problems while avoiding the problems that plague (heavyweight) active network approaches. The simplicity of ESP allows us to make it available as a general-purpose service that can be used by all packets in the network. We demonstrate the utility of the service by showing how it can be used to efficiently solve common network management problems.

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Notes

  1. In general it is not possible to completely preclude denial-of-service attacks in an IP network. By “avoiding denial-of-service” we mean that the only way to deny access to the ESP service is to deny access to the IP service. In other words a properly-implemented ESP should not introduce any new denial-of-service attacks, on itself or the network.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge the support of DARPA, the US National Science Foundation (EIA-0101242), the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation, Intel Corporation, and Cisco Systems. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Advanced Networking, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA

    Kenneth L. Calvert & James Griffioen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA

    Su Wen

Authors
  1. Kenneth L. Calvert
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  2. James Griffioen
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  3. Su Wen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kenneth L. Calvert.

Additional information

Dr Kenneth L. Calvert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Stanford (1980) and the University of Texas at Austin (1991), respectively. His research focuses on the design, specification, implementation and analysis of communication protocols.

Dr James Griffloen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1987 and 1991 respectively. His research interests include computer networks and distributed systems.

Dr Su Wen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Naval Postgraduate School. She received the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky in 2003. Her research interests include network protocol design and programmable networks.

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Calvert, K.L., Griffioen, J. & Wen, S. Scalable Network Management Using Lightweight Programmable Network Services. J Netw Syst Manage 14, 15–47 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-005-9013-6

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