Distributed Network Management

This report begins with an introduction of network management and an outline of the problems facing the existing management systems for enterprise networks. Commercial and defence related issues in effective management of the next generation of application traffic are also discussed. The following four main requirements for effective network management are extracted management must be scalable, adaptable, useful, and collaborative. Scalability is required to handle the increasingly large sizes of contemporary networks. Also, network management systems should be able to adapt to the diversity of network components. New utility at all levels of network management is necessary to handle the traffic requirements of the new kinds of applications. For example, applications may require security andor be QoS sensitive. Finally, for networks to co-exist and provide end-to-end management while maintaining local control, some kind of collaboration is needed. It is postulated that a distributed management architecture is best suited to satisfy these requirements. Several network management architectures are reviewed. The report gives an overview of existing management related technologies. The report concludes with a comparison of these technologies, a coalition management proposal, and a discussion of several related issues.