Enabling autoconfiguration of the management plane using service discovery protocols

Nowadays, management infrastructures are generally manually configured. But with the increasing development of ambient networks (mobile, ad hoc, Peer to Peer), that are characterized by their strong dynamicity and their high number of entities to manage, such configuration methods will soon prove unpractical. Furthermore, such methods are intrinsically unsuited to ad hoc and mobile networks in general. As far as configuration and use of application services are concerned, service discovery protocols (SDPs) have seen a growing interest by the community since their appearance a few years ago. They propose the needed tools to provide, discover and use services in a transparent and automatic way. In this paper we will first extract the interesting features offered by those protocols in regards with automatic configuration of the management plane. In a second part we will propose a model for this autoconfiguration based on the DNS-SD (DNS Service Discovery) protocol (used with the multicast DNS mDNS) and the SNMP standard. This model was developed for mobile networks but should scale to fixed and larger networks