Integrating IP Multicasting in Standard Network Management Protocols
Ehab S. Al-Shaer, Yongning Tang · 2000
Supporting multi-point group communications in the network management platform is essential for improving scalability and responsiveness of management applications. With the deployment of IP multicasting as the standard infrastructure for multi-point group communications in the Internet, the integration of IP multicasting in SNMP becomes significantly important to achieve these goals. This paper presents a flexible, efficient and easy-to-integrate framework for integrating IP Multicast in standard SNMP agents. The proposed framework enables managers to re-configure the agents’ group membership (e.g., join and leave) and the communication model (e.g., one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many) dynamically based on the application requirements. This framework exploits the advantages of IP multicasting without requiring any significant changes or performance overhead in the protocol or the agent architecture. Our ultimate goal is to promote the integration of IP multicasting as a standard service in SNMP agents.