On System Designs of Distributed, Extensible Framework for Network Monitoring and Control

In this paper, we present a distributed, extensible framework for supporting adaptive, dynamic network monitoring and control. We borrow the paradigm of management by delegation [8] and distribute some processing intelligence to network elements. The functionality of the delegated agents, and even that of the native software processes, could be extended dynamically without recompilation. Such procedure is called change of logic and we explain it in the framework of communicating finite state machines for extending native process functionality. We use Java technology and C/C++ dynamic linkage mechanism to achieve the standard hosting infrastructure for these agents and our system designs span a wide scope of applications.