An active approach to multimedia network management

Abstract

[Abstract]: Most of network management systems adhere to the centralized and passive approach. For large and heterogeneous multimedia networks, the centralized approach are increasingly incapable of providing required and efficient management and of measuring up to requirements of some emerging services. What come after that is the distributed approach which require the individual network elements be responsible for their own simple management chores such as performance monitoring, or fault detection. Current distributed approach are inadequate in managing of the multimedia networks where the applications are contentious to the bandwidth and sensitive to the transmission delay. In this paper, we study a new approach to multimedia network management. The new approach, which relies on the active networking technology and thereof called active approach, enables the network elements executing functions or programs. In contrast to the traditional network management strategies which resort to the centralized approach, following this approach yields a decentralized framework, which accedes the network components or elements be responsible for their own administrative chores. The administrative activities are implemented by a group of management functions embedded in the network elements. After analyzing several functions of such kind, we realize that the communication between the managed elements or stations is of serious security concern. To tackle this problem, we also present a set of protocols for network elements to transmit and authenticate the functions or executable programs among the network stations. The protocol guarantee the efficient communication and secure execution of the transmitted functions.