A P2P-Based Strongly Distributed Network Polling Solution

Several activities are employed in network management to ensure correct network operation, including administration, monitoring, and provisioning of network devices. Among them, one of the most CPUand bandwidth-intensive tasks is network polling. Although this task has to be performed in several real network management situations, it presents serious scalability and fault tolerance drawbacks if executed using traditional management architectures such as centralized or weakly distributed ones. It demonstrates the importance of investigating alternative architectures. This chapter presents a strongly distributed architecture for network polling. This architecture follows a P2P-based distributed management model, looking at P2P as an infrastructure that can be used to provide support for management operations to be accomplished in a highly distributed way. The chapter presents the polling architecture design, discusses the implemented prototype and the performance evaluation carried out to validate the approach, and provides a comparative analysis of the architecture with two other distributed polling approaches.