Network management

About: Network management is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17859 publications have been published within this topic receiving 234520 citations. The topic is also known as: computer network management & NM.

Efficient network management for context-aware participatory sensing

Abstract: Participatory sensing is becoming more popular with the help of sensor-embedded smartphones to retrieve context-aware information for users. However, new challenges arise for the maintenance of the energy supply, the support of the quality-of-information (QoI) requirements, and the generation of maximum revenue for network operator, but with sparsely research exposure. This paper proposes a novel efficient network management framework to tackle the above challenges, where four key design elements are introduced. First is the QoI satisfaction index, where the QoI benefit the queries receive is quantified in relation to the level they require. Second is the credit satisfaction index, where the credits are used by the network operator to motivate the user participation, and this index is to quantify its degree of satisfaction. Third is the Gur Game-based distributed energy control, where the above two indexes are used as inputs to the mathematical framework of the Gur Game for distributed decision-making. Fourth is the dynamic pricing scheme, based on a constrained optimization problem to allocate credits to the participants while minimizing the necessary adaptation of the pricing scheme from the network operator. We finally evaluate the proposed scheme under an event occurrence detection scenario, where the proposed scheme successfully guarantees less than 7% detection outage, saves 80% of the energy reserve if compared with the lower bound solution, and achieves the suboptimum with only 4% gap if compared with optimal solution.

Alternate routing of management message to simplified network element in a ring network

Abstract: In a ring network, a network element having no routing protocol is connected between first and second nodes, and the first node has a link status table indicating link states of the network element and the second node. The first node transmits a health check polling message at periodic intervals to the network element as well as to the second node to elicit responses therefrom, updates each of the link states when no response is returned, examines the link status table at periodic intervals, and broadcasts a message to the network for updating a routing table of a third node of the network so that an alternate route is established from the third node to the network element via the first node if the link status table indicates that there is a faulty condition between the network element and the second node. The third node transmits a network management message to the network element via the alternate route according to the updated routing table.

A component model for standardized web-based education

Abstract: We present a layered component model to support Web-based collaborative applications. We show how this model lets programmers focus on the particular logic of their applications, avoiding most of the issues related to collaboration, access control, and network management. The proposed model is organized into three layers on top of a foundation composed of commercial-off-the-shelf services and standard Internet protocols. The service level provides a network-transparent communications layer, database access, and distributed data interchange. The component level offers typical collaborative services, like user management, auditing, user-oriented messaging, higher-level events, project management, and a bulletin board. The application level supports actual applications constructed using the services offered by the underlying layers. A Web-based educational application has been developed over this framework to illustrate the process. This tele-education system, which follows the recommendations of the main institutions involved in the learning technology standardization process, is the second contribution presented by the authors.

An intelligent mobile agent framework for distributed network management

Abstract: Network management (NM) is a critical issue in today's rapidly changing network environment. Existing centralized client-server based network management frameworks suffer from problems such as insufficient scalability, interoperability, reliability, and flexibility, as networks become more geographically distributed. A framework for an intelligent mobile agents (IMA) architecture is proposed using mobile agents to achieve distributed management. The policies that govern the mobile agents' operation are specified by the management entity. The IMA architecture reduces the complexity of network management at the managing entity by delegating part of the management responsibility to the managed network entities. Adding mobility and intelligence to an agent provides many advantages such as extensibility and portability. The intelligence of a mobile agent is used to make dynamic decisions such as finding the next destination, optimizing the travel plan, and detecting link failures, as the agent travels around the network. Experimental results indicate an improvement in overall response time, easy delegation and flexibility.

Delivering Profitable Value

Abstract: Chairman, The DPV Group, LLC Hewlett-Packard’s Colorado Telecomm Division (CTD) was in trouble in the early nineties. CTD’s “Protocol Analyzers” (PA’s) helped computer managers analyze network malfunctions. Originally, CTD’s new PA’s produced much more network data than competitors, allowing network managers to make quicker diagnoses. CTD had gone six years without a new product. Competitors had attacked niches, steadily eroding CTD’s leading market share. CTD had slipped from the highest profit and growth division in its HP group to!the lowest profit, fastest shrinking. CTD’s new-product efforts had been frustrating. Projects leveraged CTD’s strength (in their eyes): producing more network data for analysis. However, as the diversity of networks increased, niche competitors designed PA’s that also produced large amounts of data but with features customizing that data to the customer’s specific network, applications or maintenance organization. CTD would discover, months into a project, that they had missed an important feature. The project would backtrack and reach the market too late, or simply grind to a halt. Managers thought R&D objectives needed to better reflect customer understanding, so CTD tried elaborate planning exercises to identify customer-desired features. They divided the market by network, application, etc. and tried to identify what features, along with large amounts of data, these various customers wanted from their PA. Surely this would work - it would be customer-driven! Instead, it only led to long statements committing all things to all people, failing to better clarify R&D objectives. Then CTD tried a new approach to their strategic dilemma. They started with exploring a “day-in-the-life” of a series of customers to see problems through their eyes. This focused not just on network managers, the traditional “customer,” but on networkmaintenance staff (the real users inside the customer-entity, from CTD’s perspective) and even on the immediate customers of network management - the employees using the network. This time, CTD did not ask what PA features customers wanted but instead spent hours at customer sites “becoming” users, managers and their customers. Becoming the customer is different from listening to customers. It meant studying what customers tried to do and how, including the users’ diagnosis and repair of network malfunctions, with what frustrations, compromises and inefficiencies. CTD sent inter-functional teams out to interview and analyze network managers, the users in maintenance, and their customers, doing their jobs in various installations. From these explorations, CTD discovered the scenarios which customers in different situations would most value. In this way, CTD discovered many users in network maintenance increasingly overwhelmed by network complexity and pressure from their customers, the network users, to maximize availability (uptime) of the network. Although the manager/buyers would still request PA’s with various features, CTD discovered that the scenario of