XML-based Network Management

XML has been applied to numerous information processing application areas for various objectives and has earned excellent reputation for simplicity, extensibility, and openness. Researchers and developers in the network and system management area have begun to investigate the use of XML technologies in order to solve the problems that exist in Internet management standards such as SNMP. However, the methods on how to apply XML technologies to network management are not yet clearly defined. This chapter attempts to provide a guideline for applying XML technologies to developing XML-based management systems and to provide an architectural framework for XML-based network management. We first examine XML technologies that can be applied to network management and how they can be applied to common network management tasks. We then present a detailed architecture of the XML-based management that can be used in developing management systems. We have validated this architecture by implementing it and using it in managing network devices and systems. 1. What is XML-based Network Management? In this section, we first explain the definition of XML-based network management (XNM) and illustrate merits and demerits of XNM. We also introduce previous research effort on XNM as a related work. 1.1. Definition of XNM XML [1] is an extensible markup language, with which one can define own set of tags for describing data. It is also regarded as a meta-language, which describes information about data. XML enables data to carry its meta information in the form of an XML document. The meta information is used for searching, filtering, and processing efficiently. The main benefits of XML are simplicity, extensibility, and openness. The simplicity of XML relies on tree structured text-based encoding of data, so one can easily create, read and modify XML documents with even the most primitive text processing tools. Although simple, XML is extensible enough to express complex data structures. The extensibility of XML allows different applications to represent their own structures of data. Because XML is an open standard, there is a wide selection of both freely available and commercial tools for handling and processing it. By supplementing XML with several advanced features such as