Towards Ubiquitous EWS-based Network Management

Most Internet networking devices are now equipped with a Web server for providing Web-based element management so that an administrator may take advantage of this enhanced and powerful management interface. On the other hand, for network management, an administrator normally buys and deploys SNMP-based network management platform to be customized to his network. Each management scheme has mutually exclusive advantages; consequently, two schemes coexist in the real world. This results in both a high development cost and a dual management interface for administrator. We propose an embedded Web server (EWS)-based network management architecture as an alternative to an SNMP based network management and to leverage on already existing embedded web server. We extend EWS-based element management architecture to the network management architecture. Our proposed architecture uses HTTP as a communication protocol with management information and operation encoding. Further we designed a management system on the basis of our proposed architecture that supports basic management functions.