Nodes discovery in the in-network management communication framework

Abstract

The main role of a communication framework in distributed autonomic management is to support the dissemination of management information between network nodes. In distributed autonomic management, each network node intelligently self-adapts its behavior through collaboration and cooperation between the several nodes. In this paper, we propose a set of communication mechanisms between self-managed network nodes, comprehending the several stages of communication, including a bootstrapping, discovery and election of entities, and ensure the base of communication of information between nodes to perform the collaborative decisions and to enforce these decisions. We propose a bootstrapping and discovery mechanism that uses the concept of Hide & Seek, where the entities change their role dynamically according to events in the network, with dynamic probing intervals according to the number of Seekers entering or leaving the network. We compare our discovery approach with current solutions, and we show that our mechanism is more efficient both in terms of control messages overhead and convergence time. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.