DRAMA 1 is a distributed policy-based management system designed to manage Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). Its design philosophy is to create intelligent, self-adaptive policy agents to manage dynamic networks without human intervention. Network management functions are performed in a distributed fashion by these policy agents, rather than being controlled by a centralized management station. Policies are used to control the frequency and content of network management messages exchanged among policy agents in a way that reduces bandwidth usage and increases the utility of management messages. This greatly enhances management efficiency and reduces the bandwidth overhead required for network management. As with any new technology, there is a question about the scalability of this approach. The purpose of the work described in this paper is to study whether the DRAMA policy-based network management system can scale to networks of 500+ nodes. The study uses a novel simulation-based approach to evaluate DRAMA performance when DRAMA is used to manage MANETs of up to 500 nodes. The results confirm that the DRAMA distributed policy-based management paradigm provides superior performance over a centralized management paradigm for MANETs.
Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have been adopted as the building blocks of future military tactical networks. We believe that the dynamic nature of such networks makes the automation of both network management and network planning a necessity rather than just a desirable feature. The creation of DRAMA, a policy-based network management system designed for managing dynamic MANETs, is the first step of this automation effort. Since the current practice requires that policies be specified manually, which we have found to be a challenging task, it is highly desirable to automate the generation of network management policies by network planning. In this paper, we present our vision of automating the management and planning of future tactical networks, describe what has been accomplished and ongoing activities, and discuss future work towards achieving this vision.
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