Perspectives on network management

The talk will start off with a general overview what network management research is all about and how it relates to network control mechanisms actively investigated by the community driving the EuroNGI conference on Next Generation Internet Design and Engineering. After this general instruction to network management research, the talk will focus on configuration management as a particularly important and not yet adequately solved topic. Several approaches that have been investigated in the past will be critically analyzed and requirements will be developed that new solutions should address. The presentation will then survey current ongoing work in research and standardization aimed at tackling the configuration management problem space. The talk is also intended to raise the awareness of network management needs in general and configuration management needs in particular in a community that usually focuses in its research on the development of primary network functions and gives less attention to the management aspects of their work