P2P-Based Management of Collaboration Communication Infrastructures

Abstract

The use of information management tools in open and unbounded operational environments demands an efficient and robust communication infrastructure in order to allow the appropriate transmission of large amount of information and the collaboration among several humans located in geographically distant places, in different organizations, and usually involving several network administrative domains. In order to provide such efficient communication infrastructure, mechanisms for data network management must be used. However, traditional network management models do not provide the required support to the management of such networks. In this context, an alternative distributed network management model must be employed to the efficient management of the communication infrastructure required to support these information management tools. This chapter presents the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies as support for the management of such networks. It presents a P2P-based distributed network management model and a network management environment that follows this model. The functionalities required for the environment are discussed, including its features, potentialities, and drawbacks.