On the performance of Web services management standards - An evaluation of MUWS and WS-Management for network management

Important steps have been taken in the recent years towards evaluating the performance of Web services for network management. Due to the lack of specific standards for Web services-based management, previous evaluations have been carried out measuring only the performance of SOAP (the basic Web services protocol) running in network management environments. While the conclusions of the papers published so far indicate the feasibility of employing Web services for network management, there is no evidence that these conclusions also hold for solutions developed according to recent Web services management standards. In this paper we go a step further and present the results of a set of experiments carried out in order to compare the specifications OASIS Management Using Web Services (MUWS) and DMTF Web Services for Management (WS-Management) against the de facto network management standard, i.e., the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The performance metrics investigated were network usage, response time, and CPU usage.