Jürgen Schönwälder

On the future of Internet management technologies

As the Internet continues to grow, it becomes more and more apparent that existing Internet management technologies need to be improved, extended or replaced in order to extend functionality and reduce development time and operational costs. Within the IETF, IRTF, and IAB, several new approaches are currently under discussion. Evolutionary approaches aim at improving currently used technologies, whereas revolutionary approaches try to replace existing management-specific technologies with standard distributed systems technologies. This article surveys the research and development work under way to develop future Internet management technologies.

Management of resource constrained devices in the internet of things

The embedded computing devices deployed within the Internet of Things are expected to be resource constrained. This resource constraint not only applies to memory and processing capabilities, but the low-power radio standards utilized further constrain the network interfaces. The IPv6 protocol provides a suitable basis for interoperability in the IoT, due to its large address space and a number of existing protocols that function over IP and its flexibility. We investigate how existing IP-based network management protocols can be implemented on resource-constrained devices. We present the resource requirements for SNMP and NETCONF on an 8-bit AVR based device.

Key research challenges in network management

Although network management has always played a key role for industry, it only recently received a similar level of attention from many research communities, accelerated by funding opportunities from new initiatives, including the FP7 Program in Europe and GENI/FIND in the United States. Work is ongoing to assess the state of the art and identify the challenges for future research in the field, and this article contributes to this discussion. It presents major findings from a two-day workshop organized jointly by the IRTF/NMRG and the EMANICS Network of Excellence, at which researchers, operators, vendors, and technology developers discussed the research directions to be pursued over the next five years. The workshop identified several topic areas, including management architectures, distributed real-time monitoring, data analysis and visualization, ontologies, economic aspects of management, uncertainty and probabilistic approaches, as well as understanding the behavior of managed systems.

Future Internet = content + services + management

While the term future Internet has gained a lot of interest recently, there is little agreement on what this term means or what the future Internet looks like. By taking the viewpoint of an Internet user who is interested in using Internet services and not so much in the protocols that move data around, we first describe some possible future Internet services. In a second step we derive some network and service management requirements, and discuss some of them in more detail.

Building distributed management applications with the IETF Script MIB

Scalable and efficient management of todays fast growing networks requires distributed management systems. This paper introduces a classification of distributed management systems, followed by an overview of technologies for building such systems. One technology, the IETF Script MIB, is discussed in detail, including an implementation architecture and performance studies. Finally, application scenarios are presented, demonstrating how distributed management applications can be built by means of the IETF Script MIB.

SNMP Traffic Analysis: Approaches, Tools, and First Results

The simple network management protocol (SNMP) is widely deployed to monitor, control, and configure network elements. Even though the SNMP technology is well documented and understood, it remains relatively unclear how SNMP is used in practice and what the typical SNMP usage patterns are. This paper discusses how to perform large-scale SNMP traffic measurements in order to develop a better understanding of how SNMP is used in production networks. The tools described in this paper have been applied to networks ranging from large national research networks to relatively small faculty networks. The goal of the research is to provide feedback to SNMP protocol developers within the IETF, researchers working within the context of the IRTF-NMRG, as well as other researchers interested in network management in general. We believe that the results are also valuable for operators and vendors who want to optimize their management interactions or understand the traffic generated by their management software.

A Survey on Internet Performance Measurement Platforms and Related Standardization Efforts

A number of Internet measurement platforms have emerged in the last few years. These platforms have deployed thousands of probes at strategic locations within access and backbone networks and behind residential gateways. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of these measurement platforms on the basis of their deployment use-case. We describe these platforms in detail by exploring their coverage, scale, lifetime, deployed metrics and measurement tools, architecture and overall research impact. We conclude the survey by describing current standardization efforts to make large-scale performance measurement platforms interoperable.

Survey of SNMP performance analysis studies

This paper provides a survey of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-related performance studies. Over the last 10 years, a variety of such studies have been published. Performance benchmarking of SNMP, like all benchmarking studies, is a non-trivial task that requires substantial effort to be performed well and achieve its purpose. In many cases, existing studies have employed different techniques, metrics, scenarios and parameters. The reason for this diversity is the absence of a common framework for SNMP performance analysis. Without such a framework, results of SNMP-related performance studies cannot easily be compared, extended or reused. It is therefore important to start a research activity to define such a framework. Such research activity should start from analysing previous studies on this topic to reveal their employed methods. In this survey we examine these studies by classifying and discussing them. We present techniques, approaches and metrics employed by these studies to quantify the performance of SNMP-based applications.

A Study of RPL DODAG Version Attacks

The IETF designed the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) as a candidate for use in constrained networks. Keeping in mind the different requirements of such networks, the protocol was designed to support multiple routing topologies, called DODAGs, constructed using different objective functions, so as to optimize routing based on divergent metrics. A DODAG versioning system is incorporated into RPL in order to ensure that the topology does not become stale and that loops are not formed over time. However, an attacker can exploit this versioning system to gain an advantage in the topology and also acquire children that would be forced to route packets via this node. In this paper we present a study of possible attacks that exploit the DODAG version system. The impact on overhead, delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, rank inconsistencies and loops is studied.

Variability of available capacity due to the effects of depth and temperature in the underwater acoustic communication channel

It is well established that path loss in the underwater acoustic channel is dependent on the transmission distance and signal frequency utilized, thereby causing the capacity to be dependent on transmission distance. It has been demonstrated that this dependence of capacity can lead to significant effects on the design of topologies for underwater acoustic networks. However, recent research in the field of underwater acoustics shows that attenuation also depends upon the depth and temperature of the environment, thereby influencing the available capacity in the channel. In light of the advent of multiple mobile vehicles being used underwater and also the high local variability of ocean conditions it is extremely important to also accurately take into account the effects of depth and temperature on the communication channel. In this paper we analyze the dependence of channel capacity upon depth and temperature by taking into account enhanced propagation loss and ambient noise models developed for the underwater acoustic channel. Numerical analysis provides us with quantification of available capacity, bandwidth and also optimum transmission strength necessary while using a time-invariant model. Due to the stark differences in the parameters effecting the underwater channel as compared to radio the results presented in this paper can be useful for designing novel approaches to maximize the performance of underwater networks.