Projecting FCAPS to Active Networks

Active Networks is one of the most promising and discussed trends in the area of Computer Networks. It allows us to program the network nodes to perform advanced operations and computations, and thus, control their behavior. These properties change considerably the scenery in the area of computer networks and, consequently, affect Network Management. Indeed, Active Networks do not only open the way to enhance current management techniques and improve their efficiency, but they also create perspectives to deploy novel ones. This paper attempts to present the impact of Active Networks upon the current Network Management techniques. In order to achieve this, Network Management is examined through the five areas of the FCAPS framework; for each one, the limitations of the current applications and tools are presented, and how these can be overcome by exploiting Active Network properties is discussed. The contribution of this paper is to gather and classify the various ideas found in the literature in this area, combine then and propose some new ones