An Extended SNMP-based Management of Digital Convergence Devices

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a standard protocol for management of network devices. It provides excellent features, such as scalability, information management, authentication, encryption, and access control. However, SNMP has a structural weakness to fully support control functions for integrated management of digital convergence devices, and it has a limitation of message length in SNMP communication. In this paper, we present an extended SNMP scheme for integrated management of digital convergence devices with control functions. We modified the SNMP architecture by adding DDS (Device Driver Subsystem) to SNMP engine for controlling different devices and by defining CADM (Control Agent Driver Model), in order to solve the ambiguity problem between ´set´ and ´control´ of SNMP. And the extended SNMP made it easy for SNMP applications to use various control functions. The extended SNMP can transport massive high-level information, such as messages in XML format by adding three new SNMP commands, which eliminate the limit of message length. Therefore, the extended SNMP is adequate to develop context-aware SNMP applications.