Network Administration using Web Services Paolo Anedda Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering University of Cagliari Cagliari, Italy Email: paolo.anedda@diee.unica.it Luigi Atzori Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering University of Cagliari Cagliari, Italy Email: l.atzori@diee.unica.it Abstract—This paper investigates the design of a network management solution that relies on the SOA concepts to access low level network services. The intent is to reduce the gap between the application and the network management, by defining an unique view on the management of the technological assets of an enterprise. In the proposed architecture, the single devices as well as groups of devices are accessed using a web service proxy, which is re- sponsible for dispatching the commands to the devices. To expose those functionalities, the proxy makes use of an object oriented library that hides the inner details of the communications with the physical devices. The resulting solution is made of four levels, which have been defined to simplify the typical management procedures and the implementation of the architecture. An architectural prototype has been developed to evaluate the main advantages, which are: the use of a common formalism for the definition of low level telecommunication services; the use of common interfaces that don’t require the operators to know the inner details of each single service; telco services at the higher levels can be obtained as a composition of other services in the lower layers using a composition and coordination logic. I. I NTRODUCTION One of the major challenges in networking field is the design of networking platforms that allow the operators to easily deploy new services in a dynamically and flexibly way so as to follow the rapid evolution of the user needs and market trends. Herein, dynamicity is intended as the capability of the network to bind on-demand services and relevant resources, often provided by different operators through separate domains, at user request and according to his profile. Even if creating new market-driven applications by reusing an extensible set of existing service components has been a key aspect of telecom platforms for years, this has almost exclusively characterized the application/service layer. Indeed, application provisioning is currently carried out without the cooperation of the lower layers, which are responsible for the delivery of the data between distributed services entry-points. Contrarily, to meet the previously mentioned challenge of dynamically providing on-demand services, there is the need for network management solutions which respond to the following demand: provide the upper layers with interoperable and open interfaces so that dynamic binding of distributed application layer services is synchronized with dynamic activation, configuration and monitoring of networking services, at any layer. This challenge is the subject of this paper, which specifically investigates the use of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Web Services (WS) technologies in this context to leverage the way the network management services are made available internally and externally to the enterprise, whereas maintaining the traditional objectives: performance management, aimed at monitoring, assessing, and adjusting the available bandwidth and network resource usage; configuration management, to gather/set/track configurations of the devices; accounting management; fault management; and security man- agement. In our work we start focusing on the configuration and fault management areas through the definition of different services that participate in the creation of a flexible and adaptable architecture for the management of the networks. In the proposed architecture every service is equipped with a standard web service interface. The access to the network devices is also carried out through simple web servirces. Essentially, a single as well as a group of devices are accessed using a web service proxy that is responsible for dispatching the commands to the devices. To expose such functionalities, the proxy makes use of an object oriented library that hides the inner details of the communications with the physical devices. The final proposed solution is made of four levels, which have been defined to simplify the typical management procedures and the implementation of the architecture. The SOA concepts have been extensively used for the deploy- ment of telecomunication services. However, few works have proposed solutions that exploit the advantages to this approach for the management of network resources at the low network layers. The main advantages of the proposed solution are: the use of a common formalism for the definition of low level telecommunication services; the use of common interfaces that don’t require the operators to know the inner details of each single service; telco services at the higher levels can be obtained as a composition of other services in the lower layers using a composition and coordination logic. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses related works that are being conducted in this area. Section 3 describes our idea and also comments on design and implementation choices of the system’s architecture. Section 4 presents a practical example and reports on preliminary tests results. Finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions and our plans for future work. This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE "GLOBECOM" 2009 proceedings. 978-1-4244-4148-8/09/$25.00 ©2009