Real-time views of network traffic using decentralized management

The ability to create views of a network on a fast time scale becomes increasingly important as the complexity and diversity of networks increase. These views, which combine information from many distributed points in the network, can provide an administrator with a better understanding of the interdependencies and interactions between network elements and traffic conditions. Applications that could benefit from being able to compute such "near" real-time views of the network range from performance monitoring to fault management. In this paper, we present the architecture of a distributed management infrastructure that enables such views to be computed. Based on our earlier work on decentralized management, our architecture takes a novel database approach that combines the expressive power of SQL with distributed algorithms. We describe the implementation of the system on platform of embedded Linux devices attached to a network of routers. We provide specific examples of how the system can be used as a powerful distributed real-time monitoring platform. Finally, we derive a performance model of the system and validate it with a set of experiments.