Assessing the Madeira NorthBound Interface

The Madeira project investigates the application of peer-to-peer technologies to distributed network management. It allows network elements to self-configure and self-heal by autonomously performing management tasks in cooperation with other peers. Madeira features a NorthBound Interface that enables communications with external systems. The Madeira NorthBound Interface uses Web Services technology provided by the Apache Pubscribe toolkit. It has been successfully assessed by means of specific tests and experiments verifying all functional requirements. Non functional aspects such as reliability, robustness, security, scalability and dependability have also been validated with quite satisfactory results. XML parsing has been found to represent the main limit to scalability. Several approaches to further improve the dependability of the interface are proposed in the paper.