| The main objective of the U.S. Army CERDEC’s DRAMA STO is to develop a network management system for managing Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) that are the foundation of future tactical networks. To tackle this challenge, Telcordia has designed and implemented a distributed policy-based network management system tailored to managing MANETs. The design philosophy is to create a set of distributed intelligent policy agents to manage a network and allow them to coordinate their actions without human intervention. The coordination is enabled through the autonomous establishment of a multi-tier hierarchical structure that is essential for scaling the management system. The system thus can scale to the size of the network by expanding or shrinking the number of tiers in the hierarchy, and appropriately assigning management functionalities to nodes at different tiers in the hierarchy.
This paper is to report the scalability study conducted to evaluate the performance of the DRAMA network management system. In essence, our study has demonstrated that under the assumed military scenarios, (i) the network management system can dynamically maintain its management hierarchy in MANETs of 500+ nodes, without incurring excessive bandwidth overhead; and (ii) network management traffic delivery ratio can be increased by more than 100%, using that of the centralized SNMP network management model as a comparison baseline. |
| Cho-Yu Jason Chiang received his Ph. D. in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University in 2000. He is currently with Applied Research, Telcordia Technologies. His research interest is in the general areas of networking, which includes Web content delivery and distribution, peer-to-peer computing, network auto-configuration, policy-based network management, and mobile ad hoc networks. He is the project lead of several government-funded projects in the area of policy-based computing, network management, and mobile ad hoc networks. Dr. Chiang has published 20+ papers in conference proceedings and journals. |