Guest editorial - XML-based management of networks and services
Aiko Pras, J. Schornwalder, Olivier Festor · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2004
Despite the fact that network operators and manufacturers face a major financial crisis, the size and importance of the Internet continue to grow at amazing speeds.At the core of the Internet, optical switches are replacing traditional switches, allowing data to flow at unprecedented speeds.At the edges, digital subscriber line (DSL) is becoming the technology of choice; within every home it is now possible to permanently connect multiple devices to the Internet.Wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots are becoming commonplace, allowing people to connect to the Internet independent of whether they are flying in a plane, travelling on a train, or sitting on a terrace.Considering the importance of the Internet in our economic and daily life, it is remarkable that technologies to manage the Internet get limited attention.Since the late 1980s, the Internet standard management framework has been based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).In the '90s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defined several new versions; the latest one, SNMPv3, has already been a full Internet standard for many years.However, despite its success, there is common agreement that SNMP technology will be unable to solve all future Internet management problems.Although it is likely that SNMP will remain the protocol of choice for many monitoring tasks, it is not the ideal technology for tasks such as configuration management.In fact, further progress in SNMP technology is unlikely to occur, and new versions of SNMP should no longer be expected.As argued in the October 2003 issue of IEEE Communications Magazine, the evolutionary approaches to enhancing SNMP failed, so it seems the time has come for revolutionary approaches.Of such approaches, the most promising ones build on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web services technologies.In this issue of this magazine, an overview of research and recent developments in that area will therefore be presented.The first article by George Pavlou et al. provides an overview of existing management technologies, such as open systems integration (OSI), SNMP, open distributed processing (ODP), and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), and the potential of new technologies such as Web services.Based on the example of the TCP connection table, the authors show how to use these technologies for management purposes.Since there have been many discussions on the performance of XML and Web services technologies, the authors conclude with a performance comparison between SNMP, CORBA, and Web services.Of key importance in network and service management is the ability to define management information in a standardized way.In the past several languages have been defined for that purpose; examples are Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects (GDMO), Structure of Management Information (SMI), and MOF.Because of the existence of many tools, XML seems to be the most appropriate syntactic framework to define such information in the future.The second article, by Jorge E. López de Vergara et al., discusses the use of XML for that purpose and proposes the use of ontology languages to enhance the semantic expressiveness of management definitions.In particular, they propose the use of OWL, the Web Ontology Language.Even in revolutionary approaches, it remains important to allow graceful transition from