Developing platform for cooperative Internet management

This paper discusses the necessity of supporting the cooperative management of TCP/IP-based networks and describes a platform for this kind of management. The Internet and intra/extranets tend to be managed by organizations that have different management skills and policies. Because these organizations use different network management systems, their cooperation causes many problems. One is an increased load on the managed network devices, and another is the difficulty of sharing management results/status among the organizations. We have designed a platform that enables the different network management systems to cooperate in solving these problems. The feasibility of the platform is discussed in terms of our prototype implementation and its application to an Internet backbone service.