WS/XML-based Management

Since the introduction of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in the early 1990's and even when version 3 made its appearance a few years back, its wide deployment for sophisticated network management still raises a lot of concerns. In the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop it became evident that SNMP can not be used for sophisticated management since its inneficiencies limit its potential usage to relatively simple monitoring. Therefore, alternative technologies are required to meet management goals such as efficiency in information retrieval, transaction support, security and also reduced development & operational costs. Distributed object technologies and, in particular, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was considered in the mid to late 1990's as a unifying management technology and, although it has come a long way since then, it still has serious inefficiencies. More recently, the introduction of Web Services, coupled with the advent of maturing eXtensible Markup Language (XML) technology standards, is seen as a promising approach for faster product development, tighter system integration and robust device management.

Web Services (WS) is an XML technology that encompasses W3C standards such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) , the Web Services Definition Lan-guage (WSDL) and the Universal Discovery Description and Integration protocol (UDDI). Since all these have equivalents in CORBA, WS can be used for distributed network management in a similar fashion to CORBA. But can they address this goal efficiently?Researchers tried to answer this question by comparing the performance of WS, CORBA and SNMP. The conclusion was that when the amount of information that needs to be retrieved increases, so does the efficiency of WS in comparison to SNMP. Smaller amounts of data though results in higher traffic for WS. The performance of WS, in terms of coding and latency, is poor in comparison to CORBA and SNMP.

Although from these first measurements it would seem that WS could only be used for network management in cases where large amounts of data need to be exchanged, this is not necessarily true. WS performance at this stage can yield ambiguous results. The goal of this research is to study efficient ways of using WS for network management and also study their performance in addressing real case scenarios management problems.

Aspects of this research field include:

• Efficient Information Retrieval
• Event Reporting and Notifications
• Transaction and Configuration Support
• Security

This section of XML/WS based management serves as a focal point for research related to network management and though it presents certain traditional management approaches it targets mostly at presenting aspects of management using Web Services.

General Description

Although initial management research and standardisation took place in the mid 1980's, the quest for a general enough technology to be used for network, system and service management efficient in terms of information retrieval, computational resources required and development/operational costs still rages. Initial attempts which relied on protocol functionality to solve the management problem (Protocol Based Approaches) like the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and OSI System Management (OSI-SM), During the 90's distributed object technologies made their appearance, the representative one being the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) which is widely used even today. Despite the fact that many technologies appeared in order to solve the management problem, SNMP was and is widely used in the Internet management domain with OSI-SM confined in the telecommunications area. While these two protocol-based approaches are used for network management, CORBA has been used mostly for service management.

Despite the fact a lot of progress has been achieved to this day in addressing a variety of management aspects, integrated management in a sophisticated, largely automated manner still remains an unreachable goal. Management automation can facilitate the rapid introduction of new services and applications for customers and can also lead to economies of scale. SNMP, CMIP and distributed object technologies exhibit a number of limitations that prevent them from being used for sophisticated management operations. The simple variable-based information model of SNMP makes modelling of complex entities really odd and difficult. At the same time the set of SNMP operations is inefficient regarding bulk and selective information retrieval. Also trap reporting is unreliable and rudimentary. This results in a largely polling-based monitoring approach that cannot cope with large-scale networks and thus cannot provide managing systems with a consistent view of the network. In SNMP the simple "Set" operations are inefficient when a large volume of information must be manipulated. Therefore coordinated sets from one configuration to another is not supported, which limits SNMP usage to just monitoring. Distributed technologies like CORBA also face problems. CORBA does not support bulk data retrieval and has no filtering capabilities. Therefore CORBA potentially introduces scalability problems while its large footprint creates difficulties in handling systems with large object populations.

These inabilities of CORBA and other approaches combined with the wide scale adoption of IP-based networking solutions as well as the emergence of the Internet as the platform for next generation services point out that there is a need for a new management framework that can perform automated management in a variety of networking infrastructures. The substitution of PSTN services which are phased out in favour of VOIP services as well as the appearance of optical switching technologies at the entirety of the telephone network (core and access) reveal the emergence of an environment which will have new and more sophisticated management requirements. This means that current technologies in the Internet network and service management area, whether they are used for monitoring or individual configuration of devices (Command Line Interface approaches) are woefully inadequate. Thus a new management framework and technology is required to address information retrieval, configuration, transaction, and event reporting according to well-defined goals and constraints.

A technology that is expected to play an important role on many future technologies including management ones is the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML and the number of applications that use it to describe, store and communicate data are increasing in geometric proportions. XML can be used quite effectively to describe management data due to its hierarchical structure of organizing information. Web Services (WS) and XML are characterised as technologies that will eventually lead to application integration of many technologies. This is one of the reasons that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Network Configuration (Netconf) workgroup are developing an XML Document based approach that will support configuration management. At the same time, other researchers are experimenting with new schemes, like gateway and information model translation schemes to make XML approaches to operate in parallel with SNMP. Another promising XML-based technology that is mostly used for the standardization of the interfaces of Internet Services is Web Services (WS). It has been shown that Web Services are a platform with many similarities to other distributed object technologies, and thus can be used for management. Research has also shown that WS have quite good potential and characteristics to facilitate the formulation of a WS-based management framework that effectively addresses a variety of management goals.

The area of XML to WS based management is a very large one, spanning across different research domains. Attempting to identify the various aspects of XML/WS based management to provide for a more systemic analysis we can view the area of WS/XML based management as classified in the following, sectors:

• Examine XML-based technologies and in particular WS as the key unifying technology for a new management framework.
• Investigate approaches and mechanisms to solve a variety of management problems:

• Scoping and filtering for efficient selective or bulk information retrieval to facilitate low cost, efficient monitoring.
• Design of scalable and flexible Information models for efficient and fast Software development.
• Powerful and scalable event management to provide a managing system with a consistent view of the network.
• Transaction support for configuration management to provide it with validation/reasoning and evolution tools.
• Security, including authentication/authorization and access control to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive management information.

• Evaluate the performance and scalability of every solution to the above problems.

Tutorials/Presentations

• W3 Tutorials on XML tools
• IBM Web Services Tutorial

Publications

• G. Pavlou, P. Flegkas, S. Gouveris, A. Liotta, "On Management Technologies and the Potential of Web Services," IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp 58 - 66, July 2004.
• R. Boutaba, W. Golab, Y. Iraqi,"Lightpaths on Demand: A Web-Services-based Management System," IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp. 101-107, July 2004.
• Mi-Jung Choi, Hyoun-Mi Choi, James W. Hong, Hong-Taek Ju,"XML Based Configuration Management for IP network devices," IEEE communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp. 84-91, July 2004.
• L.E. Menten, "Experiences in the Application of XML for Device Management," IEEE communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp. 92-100, July 2004.
• T. Klie, F. Strauss, "Integrating SNMP agents with XML-Based Management Systems," IEEE communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp. 76-83, July 2004.
• T. Klie, F. Strauss,"Towards XML Oriented Internet Management," Proceedings of 8th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM), March 2003.
• J.P. Martin-Flatin, "Web Based Management of IP Networks and Systems," Wiley Series in Communications Networking and Distributed Systems, 2003.
• J.E. Lopez de Vergara, V.A. Villagra, J. Berrocal, "Applying the web ontology language to management information definitions," IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp. 68-74July, 2004.
• G. Pavlou, A. Liotta, P. Abbi, S. Ceri, "CMIS/P++ Extensions to CMIS/P for Increased Expressiveness and Efficiency in the Manipulation of Management Information," Proceedings of 17th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM), Volume 2, pp. 430-438, March 1998.
• R. Enns, "NETCONF Configuration Protocol," Network Working Group, draft-ietf-netconf-prot-12, March 2006.
• T. Goddard, "NETCONF over SOAP Using the Network Configuration Protocol over the Simple Object Access Protocol," Network Working Group, draft-ietf-netconf-soap-08, March 2006.
• M. Wasserman, T. Goddard, "NETCONF over SSH Using the NETCONF Configuration Protocol over Secure Shell," Network Working Group, draft-ietf-netconf-ssh-06.txt, March 2006.
• E. Lear, K. Crozier, "NETCONF over BEEP Using the NETCONF Protocol over the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol," Network Working Group, draft-ietf-netconf-beep-10, March 2006.
• J. Schoenwaelder, "RFC 3535 Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop," University of Bremen, May 2003.
• M. Erickson, "On Optimization of SOAP Communications, Opportunities and Partial Solutions," to appear on a Special Issue of the World Wide Web Journal on Web Services, 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• A. Pashtan, M. Abel, "Cellular Network Management Goals and Data-Centric Solutions," IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 39, Issue 10, pp. 136-144, October 2001.
• K. Wilson, I. Sedukhin, "Web Services Distributed Management - Management of Web Services," Working draft 6, February 2006.
• A. van Moorsel, "HP Ten Step Survival Guide for the Emerging Business Web," HP laboratories Palo Alt0, July 2002.
• J. Reagle "XML Encryption Requirements," W3C Mote 04, March 2002.
• M. Sloman, "Network and Distributed Systems Management," Addison-Wesley, 1994.
• T. Drevers, "Performance of Web Services Based Network Monitoring," Thesis for a Master of Science degree in Telematics from the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands.
• E. Rescorla, "RFC 4101 Writing Protocol Models," Internet-Draft draft-iab-model-03.txt, June 2005.
• D. Eastlake, "The Protocol Versus Document Points of View in Computer Protocols," Network Working Group, RFC 3930, October 2004.
• L. Sanchez, K. McCloghrie, J. Saperia, "Requirements for Configuration Management of IP based Networks," RFC 3139,June 2001.
• M.J. Choi, J.W. Hong, H.T Ju, "XML-Based Network Management of IP Networks," ETRI journal, Volume 25, Number 6, December 2003.
• J.H. Yoon, H.T. Ju, J.W.Hong, "Development of SNMP-XML Translator and Gateway for XML-based Integrated Network Management," International Journal of Network Management, Volume 13, Issue 4, July 2003.
• J. Schonwalder, A. Pras, J.P. Martin Flatin, "On the Future of Internet Management Technologies", IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 41, no. 10, pp. 90-97, October 2003.
• A. Pras, T. Drevers, R. van de Meent, D. Quartel, "Comparing the Performance of SNMP and Web Services Based Management," Electronic Transactions on Network and Service Management, Fall 2004.
• R. Neisse, L. Vianna, L. Zabenedetti Granville, M. Almeida, L. Tarouco, "Implementation and Bandwidth Consumption Evaluation of SNMP to Web Services Gateways," Proceedings of IEEE DSOM 2004.
• D. Davis, M. Parashar, "Latency Performance of SOAP Implementations," Proceedings of 2nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2002.
• P. Shafer, "XML-based Network Management," white paper from Juniper Networks.
• V. Cridlig, O. Festor, R. State, "Role-Based Access Control for XML Enabled Management Gateways," Proceedings of IEEE DSOM 2004.
• M. Govindaraju , A. Slominski, K. Chiu, P. Liu, R. van Engelen, M.J. Lewis, "Towards Characterizing the Performance of SOAP Toolkits," Proceedings of 5th IEEE ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing Grid, 2004.
• R. van Engelen, "Code Generation Techniques for Developing Light-Weight XML Web Services for Embedded devices," Proceedings of ACM symposium on Applied Computing, Nicosia Cyprus, 2004.
• E. Harold "XML Bible," IDG Books WorldWide, 1999.
• K. McCloghrie, M. Rose, "Management Information Base for Network Management of TCP/IP based Internets," RFC 1066, August 1998.
• J. Case, M. Fedor, M. Schoffstall, J. Davin, "A simple Network Management Protocol," RFC 1067, August 1998.
• S. Vinoski, "Web Services Notifications," IEEE Internet Computing, Volume 8, Issue 2, pp. 86-90, March-April 2004.
• S. Vinoski, "More Web Services Notifications," IEEE Internet Computing, Volume 8, Issue 3, pp. 90-93, May-June 2004.
• S. Vinoski, "Web Services Addressing Metadata," IEEE Internet Computing, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp. 93-95, May-June 2005.
• A. Asgari, et. al, "Scalable Monitoring Support for Resource Management and Service Assurance," IEEE Network, Volume 18, Issue 6, pp:6 to 18, Nov.-Dec. 2004.
• A. Asgari, "Building Quality-of-Service Monitoring Systems for Traffic Engineering and Service Management," Journal of Network and Systems Management, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2003.
• B.Thurm, "Web Services for Network Management: A Universal Architecture and its Application to MPLS Networks," Proceedings of 27th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2002.
• C. Srinivasan,A. Viswanathan, T. Nadeau, "Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Traffic Engineering (TE) Management Information Base (MIB)," RFC 3812, June 2004.

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Dissemination

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