An efficient polling protocol for the management information gathering over TCP/IP

The polling protocol that gathers network management information is an important feature of network performance. This paper shows the design of a polling protocol that can gather management information from agents in an efficient way. Existing polling protocols-current polling with the same polling intervals or separated polling with different intervals-have some defects in that the probability of network congestion and the load on a manager station are both very high, and if the individual polling cycle decreases then the manager station retrieves many overlapped responses, and consequently the load on the manager station increases. The shuttle protocol can get rid of these problems, but it also suffers from some overheads, such as the error handling method, the complexity of the protocol structure, etc. The polling protocol which we have designed in this paper can mend these weak points, and the goal of the design is the simplicity of the protocol and the reduction of the network management traffic.