Topology Discovery in Autonomic Networks

Access to a topological map is important to network management. Autonomic Networks have been developed, in part, because they provide a convenient, secure platform for the development of operations, administration and management (OAM) applications, and because they make it possible to substantially reduce the need for human input in many network management situations. Using the definition of Autonomic Networks that has been developed by the Network Management Research Group of the IRTF, and standardized by the ANIMA Working Group of the IETF, we present two methods for discovering and maintaining topological information within an Autonomic Network domain. Our first method is highly distributed, and is based on clustering, while the second method is more centralized, and takes advantage of the already-defined procedure for securely initializing the Autonomic Network. We implemented both solutions on a testbed configured with three different topologies. We report the relative performance of the proposed methods.