Evaluating the performance of web services composition for network management

The composition of network management information is a feature widely required but not properly supported in traditional management technologies. In the last years, Web services technology has been investigated to enable more sophisticated management solutions. In this paper, we show that Web services have more to offer to the network management discipline than just bridging established management protocols and Web-based applications. We explore the possibility of using Web services composition for network management considering two approaches: in the first one a single device needs to be contacted and its information composed; in the second one, many devices need to be contacted and the information retrieved from them need to be composed. We show that using proper tools one can not only really use Web services composition for network management, but also that such use can be integrated with traditional management technologies that are unlike to be abandoned in short and mid terms. Moreover, we investigate the performance of Web services compositions for network management considering response time and network traffic. Performance investigations are crucial because Web services protocols are based on plain text XML documents and impose a processing overhead, which may prevent their adoption depending on the requirements and limitations of the management environment.