Using multicast-SNMP to coordinate distributed management agents

This paper presents a mechanism that allows one to implement coordination primitives for cooperating management agents based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The multicast extensions presented in this paper allow one to maintain group information of cooperating SNMP agents. We also show how an election algorithm can be implemented by multicasting SNMP messages. Election algorithms can be seen as a base functionality for the implementation of fully distributed management applications.