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[Research-funding] Re: [nmrg] network management research funding text
Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
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.
Thanks for picking this document up again! Here are some additional
comments...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
What do you mean by "hierarchical"? How about just removing this word?
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.
I think there is quite some overlap with aspects already explained in
3.5.1. However, I regard it reasonable to differentiate what the
titles of both subsections denote. (Sorry, I have to concrete suggestion
for a change.)
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.
Sorry, I cannot imagine what you mean by monitoring a network here?
Wouldn't that be comprised of monitoring multiple individual devices
combined with adequate correlation/aggregation? (I don't mind to go
into discussions on solutions on this forum.)
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.
Again some degree of overlap with 3.5.1, I think.
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.
I think this paragraph misses a final sentence, just stating what kind
of research is required to address this well described problem.
Maybe, we should have a subsection to address research not only on what
new ideas should be evolved in the future but also on what we have to
better understand about the past. The plans on NM traffic measurements
we had during recent NMRG meetings belong to this kind of research.
Sorry, again no concrete proposal yet.
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