Research And Implementation On An Intellectualized Mechanism For IP Network Topology Discovery

The topology structure of network is one of the most important features. Topology discovery is to discover all the network elements, include routers, bridges, switches, hosts, subnets, and so on, and find the physical or logical relationship among them. Through network topology discovery, we can get important servers, routers and switches, as well as the relationship among them, which is very valuable for network management, simulation of network environment, design and evaluation of protocols, analyses of network performance and flows.The basement of network management and diagnoses of problems is to know the topology structure, network devices, types of hosts, IP address and so on. Topology discovery is the first step of network management. The key of topology discovery is which types of data that can provide valuable information we should collect. While the information processing and collecting method which can be called algorithm should be the next. Different algorithms have different efficiencies, and different degrees of information mining. Different network systems need different environments, as well as different goals and different purpose, which have different requirements for network management. 'Quick', 'accurate' and 'detailed' is the common requirement of network topology discover. 'Quick' is to reduce the time which topology discover takes as possible as we can. 'Accurate' says that the result of topology discovery should be accurate. 'Detailed' says that topology discover should show the connection among hosts and switches according to the customers, and not only show the rude network structure.As the network scale becomes larger and larger, a perfect IP network topology discovery mechanism become more and more important in an IP network management system. In this paper, we will analyze many current network topology discovery algorithms, point out their main limitations, and at last a perfect intellectualized mechanism for IP network topology discovery will be provided, which can solve the limitations on low adaptability, low information integrity and low efficiency in current algorithms.In this paper, we will introduce two new theorems and a perfect topology discovery algorithm based on them. At last we will integrate topology discovery with other models in IP network management system and develop a local topology updating technology to solve the real-time issue in network topology discovery.