Toward integrating IP multicasting in internet network management protocols

Supporting multi-point group communications in network management platforms is essential for improving scalability and responsiveness of management applications. With the deployment of IP multicasting as the standard infrastructure for multi-point group communications in the Internet, the integration of IP multicasting in SNMP becomes significantly important to achieve these goals. This paper presents a highly flexible, efficient and easy-to-integrate framework for integrating IP Multicast in standard SNMP agents. The proposed framework enables managers to re-configure the agents' group membership and the communication model (e.g. one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many) dynamically based on the application requirements. This framework exploits the advantages of IP multicasting without requiring any significant changes or performance overhead in the protocol or the agent architecture. The resulting framework can be easily adopted by exiting SNMP agents of various network management platforms. Although the other approaches provide group communications through broker agents in the management platform, integrating IP multicasting in SNMP agents is more efficient and a simpler approach. Our ultimate goal is to promote the integration of IP multicasting as a standard service in SNMP agents. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.