Network Administration Using Web Services

This paper investigates the design of a network management solution that relies on the SOA concepts to access low level network services. The intent is to reduce the gap between the application and the network management, by defining an unique view on the management of the technological assets of an enterprise. In the proposed architecture, the single devices as well as groups of devices are accessed using a web service proxy, which is responsible for dispatching the commands to the devices. To expose those functionalities, the proxy makes use of an object oriented library that hides the inner details of the communications with the physical devices. The resulting solution is made of four levels, which have been defined to simplify the typical management procedures and the implementation of the architecture. An architectural prototype has been developed to evaluate the main advantages, which are: the use of a common formalism for the definition of low level telecommunication services; the use of common interfaces that don't require the operators to know the inner details of each single service; telco services at the higher levels can be obtained as a composition of other services in the lower layers using a composition and coordination logic.