Java for network management applications

Focused interfaces for end-user network management

Network management has suffered from increases in business, system, and operational complexity. This has been exacerbated by the heterogeneity in management data as well as the high quality requirements of multimedia services. Autonomic networking manages this growing complexity by adding intelligence inside network nodes and network management applications. While most autonomic applications simply use a control loop to monitor and configure entities, our work is aimed at building a self-governing network that is able to fulfill the requirements of current and future services. This means that management applications need a detailed and dynamic view of the contextual status of the network nodes as a whole in order to adapt their behaviour to changing context. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to semi-automatically generate filter rules based on existing information in a network management information model. These filter rules are used to determine the set of contextual data that needs to be exchanged with other nodes. The algorithm exploits the reasoning capabilities of ontologies and relies on the introduction of additional semantic relationships to achieve a fine-grained context exchange model. Large scale evaluations were conducted to characterise the performance of this ontological approach.

A variety of Web-based applications, mobile apps, and other over the top data services with affordable 3G/4G enabled smart devices are major factors for enormous increase in heterogeneous data traffic at enterprise and mobile networks. This creates challenges regarding traffic management and requires traffic-aware intelligent network management to deliver sustained quality of experience for subscribers. Deep packet inspection and analysis (DPIA) provides base platform for development of traffic-aware intelligent network management and security systems. However, computationally complex DPIA-related packet processing for high speed data traffic makes these systems expensive. Furthermore, conventionally these traffic-aware network management and security systems are deployed in enterprise networks with independent and dedicated DPIA-related processing resources and require multiple copies of passively provisioned high speed data from network, while performing similar DPIA operations over the same data again and again. This duplicate deployment of expensive software and hardware resources for DPIA processing eventually results in higher capital expenditures as well as operational expenditures for network operators. We have proposed a novel service-oriented framework for heterogeneous deep packet inspection and analysis (SoDPI) that simultaneously provides diversified DPIA services to multiple client applications for network management and security operations in high-speed networks. Proposed framework provides flexible and comprehensive API-based service interface for client applications to register required DPIA services. SoDPI framework implementation is based on commodity hardware and deploys shared set of DPIA-related packet processing components, requiring only single copy of passive data provisioned from network. Experimental evaluations show that novel SoDPI framework requires considerably reduced amount of software and hardware resources to fulfill heterogeneous DPIA packet processing requirements for multiple client applications in comparison with conventional network management and security applications with dedicated DPIA components. This results in lower cost impacts for network operators with more network manageability.

Today few organizations have a thorough understanding of what is on their networks at any given time. This study tries to develop Computer and Network Asset Manager (CNAM) that is a network management application which helps large enterprises, and Small medium enterprises (SMEs) service providers, manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively. CANM collects information on all hardware components of the network instruments that are on the network. In this project, a real-time network monitoring method is suggested for dynamic information to reduce the complexity and cost based on network management. In the proposed method, a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is first used to collect data for start interaction between equipment in the specific data center, to gather these data SNMP would need to request it from Management Information Base (MIB) that served as a database for stored information. Furthermore, to ensure data authenticity in the management station that fetches real-time data periodically from equipment, network engineer would have to manually key-in static information into CNAM when it was first launched. The SNMP would then pick up on this stored static information and automatically began collecting real-time data; this feature will be developed with the help of Model View Controller (MVC) pattern that is a software pattern for implementing user interfaces. It allows users to have interaction with the CNAM as well as input the related data. The object oriented approach shall be used to implement SNMP and MIB which represents system management information. Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is required in order to transfer protocol like SNMP, as well as to enter the actual data manually for further authenticity with the real time data. This study would hopefully encourage companies to try an interactive solution for problem in managing their equipment in the data center.

This article describes a key derivation method that greatly simplifies key distribution issues for network management (NM) applications and may in some cases relieve NM stations from the need to store any keys at all. This method is easily generalized for network protocols and applications where several masters need to talk to a large number of slaves. It shows a way to cut down on the amount of keys stored with little impact on security. This is especially important when human users are involved.

In this paper a new method is proposed that solves for the steady state of pressure-dependent models (PDMs) with flow control valves. Rather than model flow devices individually, the method solves the more general problem in which a water distribution system (WDS) has some link flows constrained to lie between upper and lower, or possibly equal, set limits. No heuristics are used to determine device states. The method is shown to be fast, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on PDM WDSs with up to about 20,000 links and 18,000 nodes and 60 link flow constraints, some of which prescribe a fixed flow. The method has applications in network management, network design, and flow control to deal with water distribution where there is insufficient supply.

In-band network telemetry (INT) enriches network management at scale through the embedding of complete device-internal states into each packet along its forwarding path, yet such embedding of INT information also incurs significant band-width overhead in the data plane. We propose DeltaINT, a general INT framework that achieves extremely low bandwidth overhead and supports various packet-level and flow-level applications in network management. DeltaINT builds on the insight that state changes are often negligible at most time, so it embeds a state into a packet only when the state change is deemed significant. We theoretically derive the time/space complexities and the bounds of bandwidth mitigation for DeltaINT. We implement DeltaINT in both software and P4. Our evaluation shows that DeltaINT reduces up to 93% of INT bandwidth, and its deployment in a Barefoot Tofino switch incurs limited hardware resource usage.

Most service and network management applications are developed to use vendor- and device-specific management data. These data are produced from different languages, and hence can have different representations of the same concept. We define a novel knowledge representation and mapping mechanism that uses ontological concepts and relations to generate a formal description for the Directory Enabled Networks new generation information model. This endows the model with the necessary semantic richness and formalism to represent different types of information for use in network management operations. Data is extracted from models, and is used to represent facts. These facts are semantically related to concepts and relations from one or more ontologies using a lexicon. A new data structure is then built by combining knowledge extracted from model elements with knowledge extracted from ontological elements. Semantic relatedness measures are then used to associate modeled data with ontological data. Early results are also presented.

The telecommunication industry has adopted object-oriented technology to represent specifications for a variety of standards, including those addressing inter-operability between network management applications developed in a multi-vendor environment. The CCITT TMN and OMNIPoint specifications include a large set of managed object definitions required by network management applications, and work is in progress to define additional managed objects for specific application domains. The object-oriented technology provides a more natural programming paradigm, and has a potential for higher reuse of software, resulting in a reduction of costs of development, operations, and maintenance of applications. Application development with object-oriented technology can be simplified through a set of development tools and middleware which can automate many of the commonly needed, complex, and error-prone tasks with the development. Automating these tasks allows application developers to concentrate on end-user functionality such as network fault isolation. We discuss AT&T's Management Application Architecture (MAA) which facilitates inter-operability of management applications, and inter-operability of objects and services within an application. We also discuss the object-oriented technology provided by AT&Ts BaseWorX applications platform which supports the MAA vision, and how the platform simplifies the development of standards-conformant network management applications. >

In network management applications, load balancing has typically been achieved by manually configuring the application in-situ or using configuration information generated using offline tools. As networks increase in scale and heterogeneity, management applications are being designed to take advantage of scalable computer hardware and often have multiple instances, each of which bears a portion of the management load of the network elements or functions being managed. The communication between management applications and the network elements they are managing is often stateful, posing a challenge for load balancing because connections must be managed if responsibility for managing some network elements change from one instance to another during load balancing. In this paper, we describe an algorithm that enables load balancing of telecommunication management applications for an arbitrary number of VNFs (Virtual Network Functions). The algorithm, triggered by NFV (Network Function Virtualisaton) orchestration, is horizontally scalable and there is no single point of failure once two or more management application instances are running.

Recent years have witnessed significant growth in the adoption of portable wireless communication and computing devices (e.g., laptops, PDAs, smart phones) and large-scale deployment of wireless networks (e.g., cellular, WLANs). We envision that future usage of mobile devices and services will be highly personalized. Users will incorporate these new technologies into their daily lives, and the way they use new devices and services will reflect their personality and lifestyle. Therefore it is imperative to study and characterize the fundamental structure of wireless user behavior in order to model, manage, leverage and design efficient mobile networks and services. In this study, using our systematic TRACE approach, we analyze wireless users' behavioral patterns by extensively mining wireless network logs from two major university campuses. We represent the data using location-preference vectors, and utilize unsupervised learning (clustering) to classify trends in user behavior using novel similarity metrics. Matrix decomposition techniques are used to identify (and differentiate between) major patterns. We discover multi-modal user behavior and hundreds of distinct groups with unique behavioral patterns in both campuses, and their sizes follow a power-law distribution. Our methods and findings might provide new directions in network management and behavior-aware network protocols and applications, to name a few.

This paper presents a method for improving filter-based network-state estimation by adding detection and estimation of sudden changes in the system state. This can be of benefit in various contexts, e.g. in network management and adaptive streaming applications. In particular, it is shown that the performance of available-bandwidth estimation can be significantly enhanced by employing change detection in conjunction with a filter-based estimator. The use of filtering makes it feasible to track the communication network state and to estimate selected properties in real-time. In addition, filter-based methods may be combined with change detection in order to overcome the trade-off regarding stable estimation versus speed of adaptation to change. We discuss filtering and change detection in general, and present the novel approach of combining the filter-based available-bandwidth estimator BART with the Generalized Likelihood Ratio (GLR) change-detection test, which estimates both the time and magnitude of changes.

The first study that investigates the characteristics of received probe packets and the reliability of bandwidth estimates when actively measuring the available bandwidth over radio interfaces in mobile communication networks is presented. Knowledge of available bandwidth is very useful in various contexts, e.g. in network management and adaptive streaming applications. Bandwidth measuring tools have so far primarily been designed for and evaluated in wired networks. However, such tools should also be examined in wireless networks since the use of, e.g., mobile broadband is rapidly increasing. The properties of wired and wireless links differ substantially, which affect the performance of the tools. We have made active-probing experiments over a high-speed downlink shared channel, which is used for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) in the mobile communication technology UMTS, and over a forward traffic channel in CDMA2000 1xEV-DO. Both experiments were performed over commercial networks. They show that one cannot always expect uniform per-packet processing over the radio channel in mobile networks, which is expected by many probing tools. This reduces the reliability of the available-bandwidth estimates, however we suggest how this can be handled. Finally, the mobile-network measurements are compared to experiments performed in an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, where the radio channel does not create the same packet-processing behaviour. We also discuss the possibility of using the probe traffic for the purpose of identifying the communication technology at the bottleneck of the network path, assumed this is a wireless broadband link, by mapping specifications of standardised communication technologies to observed probe-traffic characteristics. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A close look at agent and Web-based technologies and their use in the management of networks is the main theme of this paper. An analysis of how this area has changed substantially, resulting in new difficulties and challenges for information systems professionals is provided. The components of network management, including people, information; the network infrastructure, systems and network management, and their interactions are looked at initially. The changes that have occurred in this area will be outlined by this analysis, and the resulting problems and complexities described. From this point the potential role for agent technology in providing some degree of solution is explored. This exploration also considers some of the negative implications, and introduces a model proposed as the basis of an integrated agent and Web-based network management environment.

Computer Network has increased and extended dramatically in size and complexity during the passed years. In a typical computer network, there are many nodes, which different from various manufacturers and device types, distributed in different physical position where network device needed. More complex network architecture more faced difficult in network management and control. As faults are inevitable, fast detection, position, identification, isolation and recovery are key fields in network management. In this paper, based on deeply study of the current Network Management System, GIS technology and multi years network management application development, an new network management model, i.e., GIS based Network Management System, is proposed and implemented. The new model can provide object-oriented network utilities management methods, implement quick network fault position on the electronic geography map, and give new useful tools for network fault management, make the current network more robust and reliable.