Real-time network monitoring scheme based on SNMP for dynamic information

An efficient and automated network management is required in large and complex networks since it is very difficult to manage them only with human effort. In response to this need, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been developed and adopted as the de facto standard. Some management information changes with time and the management station needs to monitor its value in real time. In such a case, polling is generally used in the SNMP because the management station can query agents periodically. However, the polling scheme needs both request and response messages for management information every time, which results in network traffic increase. In this paper, we suggest a real-time network monitoring method for dynamic information to reduce the network traffic in SNMP-based network management. In the proposed strategy, each agent first decides its own monitoring period. Then, the manager collects them and approves each agent's period without modification or adjusts it based on the total traffic generated by monitoring messages. After receiving a response message containing the monitoring period from the management station, each agent sends management information periodically without the request of management station. To evaluate the performance of the proposed real-time monitoring method, we implemented it and compared the network traffic and monitoring quality of the proposed scheme with the general polling method.