MMS: An autonomic network-layer foundation for network management

Networks cannot be managed without management plane communications among geographically distributed network devices and control agents. Unfortunately, the mechanisms used in commercial networks to support management plane communications are often hard to configure, insufficiently secured, and/or suboptimal in performance. This paper presents the design and implementation of the Meta-Management System (MMS), a network-layer subsystem that provides robust autonomic support for management plane communications. We demonstrate the practicality of the MMS via a fully functional implementation that runs on commodity hardware, and experimentally show that the MMS is efficient and scalable. The MMS software is freely available.