Efficient information retrieval in network management using Web services

Web Services is an XML-based technology that has attracted significant attention for building distributed Internet services. There have also been significant efforts trying to extend it to become a unifying management technology. An all-encompassing management technology needs to support efficient information retrieval, scalable event management, transaction support for configuration management and also security. Previous technologies, such as CMIP, SNMP and CORBA have addressed these aspects poorly, partially or at a high cost. This paper proposes an approach to address efficient information retrieval in terms of both bulk and selective data transfer. In order to achieve this, services modelling management information need to be organized in a hierarchy through service association. In order to achieve service association, information metadata are defined in secondary endpoints compared to the ones where services are deployed and accessed. We have defined a language for expressing arbitrarily complex information retrieval expressions and implemented a parser at the object level that evaluates these expressions, navigates arbitrary service associations and returns the results. We demonstrate the use and usefulness of the approach in an example usage scenario.