Generic Monitoring and Intervention on Self-Configuring Networks

Self-configuration is a promising approach in network management. A self-configuring node is able to change some of its parameters autonomously according to changes of the environment (change of network conditions or information delivered from neighbour nodes). A network of self-configuring nodes promises increased scalability, low installation costs and better performances. On the other hand, such solutions introduce new possible cause of failures caused by complexity of fully distributed configuration algorithms: common drawbacks are loop configurations, oscillations of information changes and network traffic overload. At the end, the lacks of a common framework to monitor self-configuring devices constitutes a severe burden for providers to adopt self-configuring solutions in existing networks. This presentation proposes a novel architecture to monitor self-configuring devices, raise alarms when a bad behaviour is identified and filter some self-configuring operations. The architecture is based on an SNMP module to be integrated into a self-configuring node. The presentation completes with considerations to integrate the proposed framework with existing self-configuring nodes and network management systems