PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND ENHANCEMENT OF AN XML-BASED NETWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Nowadays, network management systems are becoming an essential part of any modern computer network due to continuous increasing of network size and complexity. In this paper, the traditional approaches of network management such as using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Command-Line Interface (CLI) are discussed, along with their deficiencies in network management. Also, an overview of the newly approved XML-based protocol called (NETCONF) is presented. Since SNMP-based network management is so popular, its performance measures are used, in this work, as reference to be compared to the performance of NETCONF-based network monitoring. In this work, a test-lab setup using open source implementations of SNMP and NETCONF on machines running Linux environment has been installed. The following aspects are examined: Network usage and Round Trip Delay Time. Results showed that NETCONF is more effective than SNMP in terms of speed to retrieve data from the existing managed objects of the network (a single process to retrieve large amounts of data). But SNMP is more effective than NETCONF in terms of Network usage. Finally, a methodology to improve the performance of the NETCONF protocol, by including Cluster Secure Shell (CSSH) to the implementation, is proposed and implemented. The results showed that the performance of NETCONF becomes more effective than SNMP in all cases