Handheld Network Management System Motivation

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Network Management Systems (NMS) have been around ever since the first networks were designed. However traditional NMS require resource hungry dedicated systems that manage the network. This document proposes a cross-platform mobile autonomous Network Management System that is based on handheld devices and highlights the design considerations that need to be kept in mind while implementing such systems.

About Network Management

Network management is the task of monitoring, configuring and maintaining a network environment. The propose handheld NMS design and its implementation include the number of sub-disciplines such as fault management, performance management, configurations management, event management and asset management. Fault management can be taken as monitoring and controlling the network resources. Performance management is performance data for the network. Configuration management as the name implies of network and its components installation, administration and configuration. When there are unexpected changes happen in the network there comes the Alarm or Event management. The most important aspect of NMS is to have the inventory of physical elements and of network configuration data by Asset management feature.

Chapter 2

Design & Implementation of Handheld Network Management System

2.1 Handheld NMS

A handheld NMS is a network monitoring mobile device that can easily be stored in a pocket and used while you're holding it. Today's handheld devices can be categorized in the form of handwriting as their input and with small keyboards. The most accepted handheld that accepts handwritten input is the Palm Pilot from 3Com. Philips, Casio, NEC, Compaq, and other companies make handhelds with small keyboards. Handheld devices are normally utilized for personal information manager, having contacts information like names and phone numbers, composing and sending the messages and emails and other task of accessing Web information through Internet. In this paper we are purposing the use of handheld device for monitoring the network management system by first designing this NMS then we specifically implement this system for these devices.

Network Management Standards & Protocols

Different products in the field of networks are coming from different vendors. Being the best network manager becomes difficult until specific standards are defined for interpretability. Standards bodies have recently issued network management standards. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is one of the standard body for providing network technology and protocols. RFCs of such protocols are documented and widely available.

For TCP IP based network the recommended protocol by IAB is SNMP. SNMP is described in the Internet Engineering Task Force for RFC 1157, was the Internet Standard of this time May 1990, and is now in widespread use. Devices such as desktop machines, network components like routers or switches or hubs has SNMP features given by the vendors now due to widespread use it as an open systems standard.

In this paper, we also follow the network management standards and protocols for design and implement the network management system but we adopt our design and implementation methodology.

Network Management Architecture

In the following, we describe the key components of network architecture that the most network management system has and support the TCP/IP protocol suite:

Management station

Management agent

Management information base

Network management protocol

Any network management system for a TCP/IP network must have all four of these elements to function effectively.

A management station is an interface in the form of workstation or PC provided to network manager to work together with the management system for data analysis, fault management, data presentation, etc. In this way the network manager can do the actual tasks of monitoring and controlling individual network devices. All the network devices information is stored in the database with the station.

Second key component in the network management system is the software program in all network devices referred to as agent or alternatively a proxy and hence the management agent. Trap is unwanted information that is delivered by agent to the station.

Management information base or MIB is the third key component of the architecture that exchanges the information between the management station and the agent. This information is a collection of objects or data values; each represents one aspect of the managed device.

Stations are as client and agent are like server. There is communication between them according to set of rules which is the last key component of any network i.e. the network management protocol. The mostly wide used protocol is (SNMP). SNMP uses GET, SET and TRAP commands between station and agent to communicate.

CONCLUSION

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