An Intelligent, Context Aware Resource Discovery for Heterogeneous IP Networks

Precise information about devices in a network is crucial for the management and control of network. This information is the basic input for various functionalities of network monitoring and management. Wide variety of technologies, standards and approaches are available for the discovery of network resources. Each of these technologies has got its own advantages and disadvantages when applied to different kinds of networks. Hence the development of a generic approach for the discovery of resources for all kinds of networks is very difficult. In this paper we come up with a novel network resource discovery method for IP (Internet Protocol) networks that chooses the appropriate technology, protocol or approach based on the context of network in which the discovery is executed. To facilitate the proposed scheme, we introduce a context aware model for the network-discovery of heterogeneous networks. We have implemented this approach to discover the resources in a variety of IP networks that differ in technology and infrastructure. The results show that our scheme significantly improves the performance in terms of discovery-time, total number of devices discovered and the amount of information discovered.