Enabling Distributed Management for Dynamic Airborne Networks

In this paper we describe our experience with integrating a distributed policy-based management system (DRAMA) with an open-source network management system (OpenNMS). Network operations seeking the benefits of policy-based network management often have pre-existing network monitoring systems. While these pre-existing systems are capable of monitoring the network, they are limited in their: 1) ability to provide distributed network management, 2)support for automatically reconfiguring the network in response to network events, and 3) ability to adjust management traffic bandwidth consumption based on network conditions. For dynamic networks such as those consisting of airborne platforms, there is a need to provide the above capabilities in any management solution while preserving any underlying management systems. As a result, we integrated DRAMA with OpenNMS to add distributed policy management capability to a commonly used network management system. In this paper, we describe the background for this effort, our approach for integrating OpenNMS with DRAMA, and the design of a distributed resource indirection framework that allows the use of the same policies across different distributed policy decision points managing network devices with different attribute values.