XMLNET: An Architecture for Cost Effective Network Management Based on XML Technologies

XML technologies have been recently introduced in network management towards alleviating limitations of SNMP. The XML W3C standard, along with XML technologies has the potential to boost open, interoperable, cost-effective and standards-based management solutions. This paper highlights recent efforts towards XML network management and introduces an architecture supporting XML-based network management applications. This architecture specifies a runtime environment that parses XML documents containing composite operations for individual devices, as well as for heterogeneous mutli-vendor networks. Management operations in the scope of XML documents are defined in a programmable fashion based on an XML-based composition language supporting aggregations of elementary operations, looping commands, conditional statements, as well as simple rules signifying the occurrence of specific events. The introduced environment allows network managers to define management operations featuring high-level semantics and accordingly produce sophisticated applications through XML authoring. Following the illustration of the architecture, its composition language and issues relating to security and error handling, the paper ends up presenting a prototype implementation, along with associated performance evaluation results.