Web-based distributed topology discovery of IP networks

For the purpose of distributed network management, this paper employs a Web-based distributed network management architecture which uses the same HTTP protocol to download Java applets, to access management applications, and to communicate between management applications located at different sites. The advantage of using a single protocol (HTTP) at the transport layer is that it does not require an additional process in a network management server to handle a different protocol. A Web-based distributed topology discovery scheme is developed based on the Web-based distributed network management architecture. The Web-based distributed network management architecture and the distributed topology discovery scheme are implemented using the Java servlet technique. Our experimental results show that the average delay for discovering the topology using a distributed manner yields significantly lower delay than using a centralized manner.