A Survey of Models for Computer Networks Management

The virtualization concept along with its underlying technologies has been warmly adopted in many fields of computer science. In this direction, network virtualization research has presented considerable results. In a parallel development, the convergence of two distinct worlds, communications and computing, has increased the use of computing server resources (virtual machines and hypervisors acting as active network elements) in network implementations. As a result, the level of detail and complexity in such architectures has increased and new challenges need to be taken into account for effective network management. Information and data models facilitate infrastructure representation and management and have been used extensively in that direction. In this paper we survey available modelling approaches and discuss how these can be used in the virtual machine (host) based computer network landscape; we present a qualitative analysis of the current state-of-the-art and offer a set of recommendations on adopting any