Active networks is a promising technology that allows us to control the behavior of network nodes by programming them to perform advanced operations and computations. Active networks are changing considerably the scenery of computer networks and, consequently, affect the way network management is conducted. Current management techniques can be enhanced and their efficiency can be improved, while novel techniques can be deployed. This article discusses the impact of active networks on current network management practice by examining network management through the functional areas of fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security management. For each one of these functional areas, the limitations of the current applications and tools are presented, as well as how these limitations can be overcome by exploiting active networks. To illustrate the presented framework, several applications are examined. The contribution of this work is to analyze, classify, and assess the various models proposed in this area, and to outline new research directions.

The recent considerable growth of computer networks has revealed significant scalability and efficiency limitations to the traditional management techniques. Policy-based networking (PBN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for configuration management and service provisioning. The Common Open Policy Service (COPS) and its extension for policy provisioning (COPS-PR) are currently being developed as the protocols to implement PBN. COPS-PR has received significant attention and seems efficient for several management areas. However, the rigidity of its policy-enforcing mechanisms constrains the intelligence that can be pushed toward the managed devices. This work aims at relaxing this limitation by using meta-policies, rules that enforce the appropriate policies on the devices. Meta-policies are stored and processed by the devices, independent of their semantics, thus making the model more efficient, scalable, distributed, and robust. The additional functionality is implemented through a novel policy information base we have defined, the Meta-Policy PIB.