A navigation pattern for scalable Internet management

Performing global management operations on the Internet in an efficient way is difficult, because of the continuous changes to the Internet topology, its large number of nodes and the lack of an up-to-date global database. In practice, these difficulties appear in the management of large private IP networks and large autonomous systems, which form the sub-topologies of the Internet and are under independent administration. This paper introduces the echo pattern, a scheme for distributing management operations, which addresses these difficulties. Management operations based on this pattern do not need knowledge of the network topology, they can dynamically adapt to changes in the topology, and they scale well in very large networks. A management operation based on the echo pattern has two phases. In a first phase, the network is being flooded with management commands to be run on the network elements. In the second phase, the results of the local management operations are aggregated inside the network. We analyze the echo pattern with respect to time and traffic complexity and compare its performance to that of a centralized management scheme. Our results show that “typical” echo-based management operations could be executed within some 18 seconds on the entire Internet. This short time is due to (1) the high degree of parallelism and distributed control in this pattern and (2) some specific properties of the Internet topology