Investigating Web Services Composition Applied to Network Management

The composition of network management information is a feature widely required but poorly supported in traditional management technologies. Recently, Web services for network management has been enabling the investigation of more sophisticate management solutions, even though some concerns related to the Web services performance have been initially exposed, but quickly disappeared after the first research results. In this paper we show that Web services technologies have more to offer to the network management discipline than just bridging established network management protocols and Web services protocols. Particularly we explore the possibility of using Web services composition applied to network management. If successful, Web services composition can bring to network management the solution for some key problems yet to be solved, such as retrieving the information from several different devices and yet being able to use a simple and fast interface at the manager side. We present Web services composition for network management considering two approaches: in the first one a single network device needs to be contacted and its information composed; in the second one, many devices need to be contacted and the information retrieved from them need to be composed. We show that using proper tools we can not only really use Web services composition for network management, but also that such use can be integrated with traditional management technologies that are unlike to be abandoned in short and mid terms