Opportunities, Requirements and Challenges for Storing Network Management Information in a Decentralized Way

The upcoming peer-to-peer (P2P) and other decentralized, co-operative storage mechanisms allow for decentralized storage of data as well as decentralized search, depending on the specific system. In this work, we assume these kinds of systems to store management information into it. We discuss some of the opportunities, requirements, and challenges when storing network management information decentralized. Additionally, we discuss some issue, when we assume the management plane itself being decentralized, adding the aspect of distributed processing. Distribution of storage and processing resources make the use of such systems very helpful, but still require some changes from today's known systems, which are typically targeted to store content for end-users, for example in file-sharing or content delivery networks (CDN).