An Architectural Framework for XML-based Network Management An Architectural Framework for XML-based Network Management

Internet management is mostly based on IETF standards, such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which was developed at the end of the 1980’s and is widely used since then. Today, SNMP is the most widely deployed management technology. However, the SNMP management framework has some drawbacks in network management tasks, such as the management information model, instrumentation, management protocol, analysis, and presentation. Recently, XML-based network management, which applies XML related technologies such as XML Schema, DOM, XPath, XSLT, etc. to network management, has been proposed as an alternative or a complement to the existing network management. The use of XML in network management offers many advantages. XML provides powerful modeling features for structured management information in network management, and XML-based Network Management (XNM) can transfer a large amount of data over HTTP. Also, XNM can be easily implemented using standard API and freely available software. This advantageous applicability of XML technologies to network management tasks solves much of the SNMP problems. In addition to the SNMP problems, the current XML-based network management reveals some weaknesses because of the lack of sufficient implementation experience. The current XML-based network management does not completely provide the architecture of an XML-based network management system (XNMS). Also, the XML-based network management does not fully implement the XML/SNMP gateway to manage already existing SNMP agents DECE