Performance Analysis of Drama: A Distributed Policy-Based System for Manet Management

DRAMA is a distributed policy-based management system designed to manage mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Its design philosophy is to create intelligent, self-adaptive policy agents to manage dynamic networks without human intervention. Network management functions are performed in a distributed fashion by these policy agents, rather than being controlled by a centralized management station. Policies are used to control the frequency and content of network management messages exchanged among policy agents in a way that reduces bandwidth usage and increases the utility of management messages. This greatly enhances management efficiency and reduces the bandwidth overhead required for network management. As with any new technology, there is a question about the scalability of this approach. The purpose of the work described in this paper is to study whether the DRAMA policy-based network management system can scale to networks of 500+ nodes. The study uses a novel simulation-based approach to evaluate DRAMA performance when DRAMA is used to manage MANETs of up to 500 nodes. The results confirm that the DRAMA distributed policy-based management paradigm provides superior performance over a centralized management paradigm for MANETs