On the Impact of Using Presence Services in P2P-based Network Management Systems Carlos Raniery Paula dos Santos, Sergio Cechin, Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville, Maria Janilce Bosquiroli Almeida Liane Margarida Rockenbach Tarouco Institute of Informatics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Email: {crpsantos, cechin, granville, janilce, liane}@inf.ufrgs.br Abstract—The use of notifications to inform the status of network devices and software to network administrators has a crucial function to guarantee the correct network operations and to prevent unnecessary costs. Presence services have been designed with the objective to provide ways to deliver presence information to interested parties, however they are used only in communications systems. In this paper we thus present a proposal that aims to using presence services in P2P-based network management systems. I. I NTRODUCTION Over the last years the increasing complexity of computer networks has been leading researchers from academia and industry to pay more attention to the network management activity. Network management models and tools have been proposed to help corporations to more adequately manage their network infrastructures. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [1] is still the the facto TCP/IP network man- agement solution. However, traditional solutions like SNMP are not sufficient anymore when the current computer networks needs [2] are taken into account. For example, the Internet became a fragmented network with the introduction of NATs and firewalls, which prevent the network administrators to find and access devices from other remote administrative domains. That makes impossible, for instance, the management of dynamic and multiple domain environments like those formed by Virtual Organizations (VOs) [3]. In this context, the network management community started to investigate the use of other technologies that were originally defined in other areas, such as Web Services (WS) [4] and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) [5]. Several researches demonstrated that these technologies can significantly improve the network man- agement process [6]. Examples of this improvement include the ability of building more sophisticated management systems through WS composition, and the possibility to have more scalable and high available management solutions using P2P systems. Despite the advantages offered by these new technologies, their use for network management is usually associated with greater consumption of the network resources when compared to traditional management solutions. In order to reduce this extra consumption, mechanisms already used in the past in the network management field, may be re-employed in the new context. Notifications are one of these mechanisms, which is used to notify the current status of network devices and softwares to network administrators. With the use of notifications the traditional polling process can be replaced by asynchronous messages that are generated and sent to interested managers only when necessary. One way of imple- menting notification support is by using the Publish/Subscribe paradigm, where producers publish information to consumers who register interest in receiving them. This process reduce the amount of management messages that are exchanged in the network, thus improving their efficiency. The functionality of notifying the status of network devices is similar to presence services found in Instant Messaging (IM) systems, since both have as objective capturing status information (e.g., online, offline, busy) of entities (i.e., people, devices or softwares) and report it to interested parties. The concept of presence has been firstly used in instant messaging systems but today it can be found in diverse applications with different goals (e.g., VoIP and videoconferencing as in Skype’s case). Presence services are also frequently found in P2P systems, where presence information is used to report operation details of a P2P overlay (e.g., peers connectivity, shared resources) to the peers who compose such overlay. Given the need to ensure that the management information is delivered efficiently, and considering the lack of knowledge of how is the behavior of presence services when employed with P2P-based network management systems, this work aims at presenting a management architecture based on P2P technolo- gies that use traditional presence services as notification mech- anism. As mentioned, the use of P2P as a tool for managing networks is already being investigated in academia, but there is no researches that exploit presence services as a possible mechanism for reporting the network status. Thus, this work also makes a comparison between presence services provided in our prototype implementation in order to identify which presence service solution is more appropriate for different situations. This remaining of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents current work done in network management area that uses P2P technology. In the same Section we show some concepts of the main current presence service models in Section 2. Section 3 presents the management architecture 978-1-4244-5638-3/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2010 proceedings.