[Research-funding] network management research funding text

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder@iu-bremen.de>]

Below is some text for section 3.5 of the IAB research funding draft.
I basically took the text from <draft-iab-research-funding-01.txt>
and rearranged it and added a few pieces here and there. I understand
that the idea is to not be comprehensive and so I tried hard to not
add lots of additional research topics people actually work on.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany
3.5.  Network Management

   The Internet had early success in network device monitoring with
   the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and its associated
   Management Information Base (MIB).  There has been comparatively
   less success in managing networks, in contrast to the hierarchical
   monitoring of individual devices. Furthermore, there are a number
   of operator requirements not well supported by the current Internet
   management framework.  An enhanced network management architecture
   that more fully supports real operational network management needs
   is desirable.

   Unfortunately, network management research has historically been
   very underfunded, because it is difficult to get funding bodies to
   recognize this as legitimate networking research.

3.5.1.  Managing Networks, Not Devices

   At present, there are few or no good tools for managing a whole
   network of instead of isolated devices. Current network management
   protocols such as SNMP are fine for reading status of well-defined
   objects from individual boxes. But managing networks instead of
   isolated devices requires to view the network as a large
   distributed system. Research is needed on scalable distributed data
   aggregation mechanisms, scalable distributed event correlation
   algorithms, and distributed and dependable control mechanisms.

   Applied research into methods of managing sets of networked devices
   seems worthwhile.  Ideally such a management approach would support
   distributed management, rather than being strictly hierarchical.

   As an example, the current set of network management tools for
   managing multimedia (voice and video) IP networks is inadequate, and
   research would be useful in this area.  The lack of appropriate
   network management tools has also been cited as one of the major
   barriers to the deployment of IP multicast [Diot00, SP03].

3.5.2.  Configuration Management

   Operators at the IAB Network Management Workshop [RFC-3535] held in
   2002 reported that scalable distributed configuration management
   for sets of network devices is a significant challenge today.  In
   particular, it is desirable to execute configuration transactions
   across a number of connected devices, which requires protocols that
   support distributed transactions.  Furthermore, configuration data
   should be represented in a way which simplifies the processing and
   generation of configurations with standard tools.

   Even individual improvements in configuration management for sets
   of networked devices would be very welcome.  Such improvements
   would need to include an integrated approach to security for the
   configuration data.

3.5.3.  Enhanced Monitoring Capabilities

   SNMP does not scale very well to monitoring large numbers of
   objects in many devices in different parts of the network.  Some
   implementations also show inaccuracies (especially when monitoring
   on shorter time scales) or they lack support for the objects that
   operators are interested in. An alternative approach worth
   exploring is how to provide scalable and distributed monitoring,
   not on individual devices, but instead on groups of devices and
   networks-as-a-whole.

3.5.4.  Improving the Scalability of Network Management

   Current approaches to network management do not scale sufficiently,
   so network operators often have difficulty operating their
   network(s) as successfully and economically as desired.  Hence,
   more work is needed to improve the scalability of network
   management systems.  This might involve application of control
   theory, artificial intelligence, expert systems technology, or
   other mechanisms, for example.

3.5.5. Customer Network Management

   An open issue related to network management is helping users and
   others to identify and resolve problems in the network.  If a user
   can't access a web page, it would be useful if the user could find
   out, easily, without having to run ping and traceroute, whether the
   problem was that the web server was down, that the network was
   partitioned due to a link failure, that there was heavy congestion
   along the path, that the DNS name couldn't be resolved, that the
   firewall prohibited the access, or something else.