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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

MASTER'S THESIS PRESENTATION

                    -Monday, January 25, 1993

Brian Gratto, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ.
Waterloo   will  speak  on  "Network  Management  Using
Aggregate Agents to Monitor Subnet Load".

TIME:                2:30-3:30 p.m.

ROOM:                DC 1331

ABSTRACT

In  today's  corporate  and  educational  environments,
there  is  an  ever-growing  need  to  provide  network
management for large heterogeneous networks. The Simple
Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been proposed as
a  standard  by  the Internet community to perform this
function.  Although SNMP has gained wide acceptance, we
have  identified deficiencies in two areas: scalability
and    manager-to-manager   communication.   The   SNMP
philosophy  of  a  manager  polling  an agent to obtain
information  does not scale well to large networks with
hundreds  of  hosts. In addition, there is no mechanism
for  one  manager to communicate with or make collected
information  available to another manager. We introduce
the  concept  of  the  AGGREGATE  AGENT  to solve these
problems.  The  aggregate  agent  provides  a method of
subdividing  a  large  task  so  it  can  be handled by
multiple managers, allows the imposition of a hierarchy
for  the  flow  of  network information, and supports a
mechanism   for  a  manager  to  make  its  information
available  to  other  managers.  The  talk  focuses  on
illustrating  the aggregate-agent concept by describing
an  implementation  of a network-management application
that   employs    aggregate  agents.  This  application
monitors the average packet load for an arbitrary group
of   subnets.   The   collection  method  used  in  the
application  is  validated  by graphical comparison and
spectral  analysis  relative  to  data  collected  by a
protocol  analyser.  An  experimental  deployment  on a
group of eight subnetworks comprising over 180 hosts is
described  and  the  data  collected  is  presented and
analyzed.