On Semantic and Compliance of SNMP MIBs in IP/MPLS routers

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Framework, is one of the most diffused and successful protocol for network management generally available in current network devices. This work studies the dynamic evolution of the SNMP Management Information Based (MIBs) of commercial IP/MPLS routers and evaluates the effectiveness of the relevant implementation. In addition, it characterizes the MIB modules involved in the provisioning of a connectivity and investigates the compliance of MIB implementation as regard the standard specifications. The obtained results were achieved by means of a testbed comprising a software tool developed by the authors. In particular, these results revealed that current MIB implementations do not respect standard specifications in terms of accessibility of the MIB objects. In addition, MIB are often used as a database for storing implementation-specific information, not foreseen by standard specification, rather than to support router operations. Finally, it was found that the configuration of simple connectivity requires the creation and modification of hundreds of different MIB objects thus making the use of SNMP limited to the collection of management information and general notifications.