A peer-to-peer registry for network management Web services

Network management becomes more and more complex with growing networks. Web services are seen as a possible way to deal with the complexity. To exploit the advantages of Web services, a management system must be aware of the management functionality that is offered by the devices as Web services. In a distributed management environment, a centralized registry is not suited. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer registry that is based on semantic descriptions of the available management Web services. The idea is to let all devices that offer management Web services take part in the overlay peer-to-peer network, such that no external or central registry server is needed. We show how a policy-based management system that depends on Web services can benefit from such a registry, discuss some of the implementation issues, and give evaluation results.