SubmissionZuniga and others1 XML for Wireless Network Management Juan-Carlos Zuniga, Marian Rudolf, Joe Kwak, InterDigital and Paul Gray, Jason Luther, AirWave doc: IEEE /1104r0 September 2004

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 2 Contents SNMP IETF and Internet management protocols XML Advantages of XML Issues with XML Summary

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 3 SNMP Traditionally, has provided standardized support for network management of wireless devices by defining MIB’s for use with SNMP SNMP is an Internet management protocol developed widely deployed today in network devices Can read and write simple variables Follows an Manager-Agent paradigm Get/Set requests and Notifications by agent Technology-specific data models defined and standardized in MIB modules based on SMI (itself based on ASN.1) Advantages of SNMP Usually good for network monitoring tasks, even large scale, many tools and scripts are available for that purpose

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 4 SNMP network management architecture SNMP Agent SNMP Manager Consists of a “manager” and “agents”: “Manager” (Network Management Station-NMS) is the console through which the network administrator performs network management functions. “Agents” (Bridges, Routers) are the entities that interface to the actual device being managed. These objects are arranged into a management information base (MIB)

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 5 SNMP (cont’d) But SNMP has shortcomings and limitations, Inadequate for device configuration management In practice, many products today lack good SNMP support, oftentimes CLI or HTML/HTTP interfaces must be used instead SNMP-based management applications have slow and expensive development cycles No self-contained security mechanism with SNMP v1/v2 In practice today, standardized MIBs are oftentimes supplemented by proprietary MIB extensions, a general problem for interoperability and developers But most of all, SNMP/MIBs are not human-readable, for example, User requires an SNMP agent to communicate with the device and (literally) a printout of the textual MIB to find out that, " " means SSID

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 6 Thoughts… Future wireless network management will extend beyond just monitoring tasks Re-/Configuration and fast adaptation to system behavior will become at least as important, but SNMP imposes limits Lack of good SNMP support in many products should suggest that a replacement is needed Network management protocols are primarily IETF business, but similar to MIBs with SNMP, standardized support at PHY and MAC needs to be introduced by We suggest that alternatives to standardized support in form of SNMP/MIBs be investigated here in Wireless Network Management: The most prominent candidate seems to be XML

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 7 Status of SNMP and XML in IETF IETF created SNMP in the late 80s/early 90s and has ever since been endorsing its use as the preferred Internet network management tool More recently, IETF spent considerable effort to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the current SNMP (v1-v3) protocols SNMP never achieved significant commercial success, unfortunately clear-cut alternatives are far from obvious XML-based approaches like JunoScript and WSDL as an alternatives to SNMP has been investigated only recently (~2002), after being ignored for a long time The IETF expects that some successor to SNMP for the purpose of internet management will eventually succeed, but it is currently unable to determine which solution would best suit market conditions Network Configuration WG formed in 2003

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 8 XML XML was developed by a Working Group formed under the WWW Consortium in 1996 Many use cases for business-to-business integration, data interchange, e- commerce, creation of application specific vocabularies XML is a markup language that is used to contain structured information into documents Web servers and applications encoding their data in XML can quickly make their information available in a simple and usable format, and such information providers can interoperate easily XML is a generally self-describing data format IETF is currently studying XML in new NetConf WG Requires developers to specify their own “tags”, specific to the management context To define how “data” is to be interpreted How to transmit “data” between applications

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 9 XML network management architecture Currently deployed SNMP based network management Gateways to translate msgs, ops between XML,SNMP schemes XML scheme using XML-based agent & manager (d)

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 10 Advantages of XML XML makes easier what is not always easy with SNMP Defines data structure in a easy, flexible and very powerful manner Reliable bulk transfers of data, time series of data snapshots,… Much higher abstraction level for management application developers More important, XML is human-readable, for example User requires only a text editor and a web browser to look at the XML configuration document to see something like,... IEEE

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 11 Advantages of XML (cont’d) Additional benefits of XML Transfer of management data using commonly deployed protocols, such as HTTP and TCP Better integrates management data from disparate sources, i.e. interoperation among management applications from different vendors Good at support for hierarchical network / data management models Allows for automatic / centralized validation of management data Compatibility - soft transition from SNMP is in principle possible XML “translators” / gateways to deal with legacy Network Management deployments

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 12 Issues with XML Technical issues XML-based network management may increase traffic loads Potential delay issues in transition architectures involving XML gateways Details of legacy SNMP support Standards issues No precedence in for standardized XML support of wireless devices Similar to SNMP, we do not deal with higher layer aspects nor applications IETF does currently not officially endorse any successor to SNMP, XML is only one (promising ?) option

doc: IEEE /1104r0September 2004 Submission Zuniga and others 13 Summary SNMP has shortcomings, but no clear-cut alternative or successor has been identified in IETF XML is both very flexible and very popular in various fields and moreover it is one of IETF’s candidates for future Internet management protocols Future network management for wireless devices and infrastructure should allow for more features, be effective and inter-operable – limitations with SNMP/MIB today We suggest that alternatives to standardized support in form of SNMP/MIBs be investigated here in Wireless Network Management: The most prominent candidate seems to be XML