Lightweight discovery and exchange of network information in distributed network management

Node cooperation is a key part of distributed management process, requiring periodic exchange of management information between the nodes. To increase scalability of the network information exchange, network nodes need to cooperate through an efficient set of rules, policies and criteria, to minimize the time and amount of control messages flowing in the network. We propose a solution for optimized decision of the network nodes to perform discovery and exchange of network information, through a Neighbors Eyesight Direction (NED) function and cooperation between the nodes. The proposed solution is embedded into a protocol, named HIde and SeeK Directional Decision (HISK2D), which is compared against current protocols for network discovery and awareness. We show, by means of experimentation, that our HISK2D is more efficient than the base approaches analyzed, in terms of control overhead to discover the nodes, convergence time and exchange of network information according to the acquired knowledge of the network.