Management of Active Networks
Marcus Brunner, Bernhard Plattner · 1998
Active networks provide the possibility to perform com-putations within the network. This feature introduces greater flexibility, but more complexity as well. There-fore, a sound management of active networks is a prereq-uisite to the acceptance of such networks. Management of large complex systems can be improved with the intro-duction of further abstraction levels and with moving the responsibility for the management down the line. Net-work management applications have two basic tasks to perform: operation of a node and control of message exe-cution. In active networks there is a need for debugging functions a user has injected into the network. For opera-tion and debugging, the monitoring of events occurring within an active network, and visualizing it, helps per-forming these tasks. Utilized and well scaling mecha-nisms for monitoring active networks are node clustering, event abstraction and filtering which have been applied to the presented prototypical implementation. We further propose a framework for monitoring and managing the active network. 1