STAMP: Towards A Scalable Topology Announcement and Management Protocol

This work addresses the problem of topology discovery and aggregation. For topology discovery, current solutions concentrate on using probe techniques like the MIBs in routers and gateways, the Internet control message protocol (ICMP), the traceroute program, the domain name system (DNS), etc. In contrast, this paper presents the simple topology announcement and management protocol (STAMP), a simple mechanism which infers the network topology by injecting suitable "hello" adjacency messages between direct connected devices. The discovered topology covers both the data link and the network layers. STAMP can be applied on large as well as on small topologies. In order to overcome scalability issues, we designed some mechanisms to hierarchically structure the discovered topology using aggregation to pull up management functions into the higher levels of the hierarchy. In the first version of STAMP we are interested in the design of a scalable call admission control management function, which has an increasingly important role for quality of service delivery in the new networking systems like IMS (IP multimedia subsystem). The paper presents the key points behind STAMP. It describes the protocol design as well as its behavior and hierarchy. Finally, some preliminary results presenting the application of STAMP in the scope of call admission control are shown in the end of the paper.