A cooperative Hide and Seek discovery over In Network Management

Future networks are expected to become more complex and dynamic than today´s networks. A centralized approach for network management is not able to deal with such complexity and dynamics, and will then introduce scalability problems. The concept of In Network Management (INM), where each INM entity (a network node) has the autonomy to self-govern its behavior, is being researched as an alternative to solve these scalability problems. In this concept, each INM entity participates in a distributed management process, which requires cooperation between INM entities to monitor, analyze, decide and act upon the network. However, to ensure the communication of INM entities in In Network Management process, several phases need to be performed, such as, discovery and bootstrapping, exchange of network information, dissemination of local decisions and final decision dissemination for enforcement. In this paper we address the discovery, bootstrapping, and exchange of information between INM entities, towards the complete INM process. We propose Hide and Seek (H&S), a new algorithm for network discovery, and information propagation and synchronization. The results show that H&S spends fewer cycles to discover all INM entities and records lower messages overhead for information synchronization compared to non-controlled and probabilistic (gossip) flooding dissemination.