Scalability of peer configuration management in partially reliable and ad hoc networks

Current interest in ad hoc and peer-to-peer networking technologies prompts a re-examination of models for configuration management, within these frameworks. In the future, network management methods may have to scale to millions of nodes within a single organization, with complex social constraints. In this paper, we discuss whether it is possible to manage the configuration of large numbers of network devices using well-known and not-so-well-known configuration models, and we discuss how the special characteristics of ad hoc and peer-to-peer networks are reflected in this problem.