Chameleon: A flexible and extensible network management architecture

Computer networks are becoming larger and more complex in size, heterogeneity, and functionality, resulting in higher effort and cost of network management. The polling-oriented mode of operation of current management protocols has obvious drawbacks with respect to performance, scalability, and inefficient use of network resources. Management applications on centralized management system are monolithic, hard to tailor and configure. Current management operations are labor-intensive with many tasks that require intensive involvement of network administrators. The next-generation network management systems quite often have to support new features (e.g., QoS, VPN, etc.) and must be capable of extending with new features and changing with new management requirements at runtime without rebuilding management applications.; Chameleon is a new architecture for network management software development, which is a flexible, dynamically extensible and component-based. Chameleon attempts to overcome the problems of centralized management systems by defining a management paradigm characterized by the following properties: light management framework, easy implementation of network management applications, flexibility and extensibility at runtime. Chameleon provides an easy and flexible mechanism to implement distributed network-management applications and to extend (add, change, or remove) their network management capabilities at runtime according to dynamic network management environments.; Management by Chameleon (M_bC) is designed with dynamic delegation of centralized management intelligence. Two different approaches have been evaluated in M_bC. (1) Bottom-up approach; rather than the agent on network elements returning a set of data to be operated on by the manager, the function that the manager wishes to perform is dynamically migrated into the network elements. (2) Top-down approach; rather than the manager delegating the management function directly to the network elements, the function is delegated onto the intermediate management entities with sufficient resource closer to a set of the network elements being managed.; A subset of Chameleon functionality is implemented using Java (JDK 2) and the Web technology. Chameleon has clearly demonstrated that M_bC-based management applications effectively overcome problems that affected conventional management systems.