On Network Management for the Internet of Things

Qinghua Wang, Riku Jntti, Yusein Ali

Aalto University
School of Electrical Engineering
Department of Communications and Networking
PO Box 13000, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland
{qinghua.wang, riku.jantti, yusein.ali}@aalto.fi
AbstractThis paper studies network management issues for a
new communication paradigm the Internet of Things (IoT).
Basic management functionalities and requirements for the IoT
management are discussed. A management structure is proposed.
In the end, an extension of the SNMP protocol is suggested for
the IoT management.
Keywords- network management; Internet of Things; SNMP

I.

INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new communication

paradigm which extends the traditional human-to-human
communication paradigm to the more modern thing-to-thing or
thing-to-human communication paradigm. It is an area that the
traditional communication technologies including the Internet,
cellular networks and satellite networks, and the future
communication technologies including wireless sensor
networks, machine-to-machine communication, RFID, merge.
A characteristic of traditional networks is that there are heavy
infrastructures, such as routers, base stations, power lines, etc,
while the IoT extends the traditional networks to noninfrastructure communication with simple and easy-to-deploy
intelligent devices, such as sensors and RFIDs.
Because the IoT is a new communication paradigm, it also
introduces new challenges to network management. The basic
principle of network management is shown in Figure 1, where
the IoT operation is constantly monitored by the management
facilities. If there is a change in the management policies or
configurations, this is also reflected in the IoT operation and
can be monitored. The network-level management acts
according to the real-time network operation status and the
changed network management requirements. This is pretty
much like a closed-loop control system.

Figure 1: Network management

What makes the IoT management especially challenging

includes the scale of the network size, the dynamic network
operation status, and the resource constraints. A good network
management system for the IoT should be able to react to
dynamic network operation changes in real time and to fulfill
network resource constraints, such as energy and memories,
and to provide a good scalability and interoperability with
infrastructure networks.
In the following, an in-depth discussion about the IoT
management, its requirements, functionalities, challenges and
solutions will be given.
II.

IOT IN OUR VISION

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the technology where

our future Internet is enabled to communicate with things
(e.g. everyday objects, cars, power meters, air conditioners,
etc.). It is a place where different technologies, such as the
Internet, cellular networks, wired and wireless sensor and
actuator
networks,
RFID,
and
machine-to-machine
communication, etc., merge. With the architecture of the IoT,
many new and exciting applications could be envisioned. The
most exciting application scenarios include:
a remote
healthcare application where doctors can monitor the healthy
status of patients remotely via the IoT; a smart grid application
where increased use of digital information and controls
technology are used to improve reliability, security, and
efficiency of the electric grid; an environmental monitoring
application where dangerous places such as volcanoes, glacier,
and disaster scenes can be monitored; an intelligent traffic
application where cars can talk with traffic signs, cellular
phones as well as other cars to significantly improve traffic
security and optimize traffic flow; etc. A sketch map of the IoT
is illustrated in Figure 2. A recent complete survey of different
enabling technologies and different visions of the IoT is given
by [1]. To enable this kind of intelligent communication and
cooperative action among things and between things and
the Internet, these things are extended with sensors, RFIDs,
actuators, micro processors and communication transceivers
which in together turn dead things into smart things.
Ericsson estimates there will be 50 billion interconnected
intelligent things by 2020, which would amount to around 10
things for every human on the earth.

Figure 2: Internet of Things

III.

NECESSITY OF THE IOT MANAGEMENT

The popularization of the Internet has been accompanied by

the implementation of different kinds of network management
protocols. SNMP [2] has been widely used for monitoring fault
and performance of network components in the Internet.
SYSLOG [3] allows a host to send system log messages across
the Internet to an event message collector. IPFIX [4] can be
used to perform usage accounting, traffic profiling, anomaly
detection and QoS monitoring based on flow-based traffic
measurements. NETCONF [5] provides mechanisms to
configure network devices. RADIUS [6] and DIAMETER [7]
are protocols which can carry authentication, authorization, and
configuration information between a network access server and
a shared authentication server.
The IoT is expected to expand the future Internet with at
least ten times more connected devices. The new network
paradigm will not function efficiently if there are no efficient
network management mechanisms. In the simplest scenario,
there will be a need of management which is comparable to the
ones adopted by the current Internet. The interconnection of
wireless sensor networks, RFID and machine to machine
communication networks with the Internet-like infrastructure
networks will require management functionalities being
extended to these new paradigms of communication. For
example, the collection of energy states will be extremely
important for energy-aware operation of energy-constrained
sensor networks. Data compression and data fusion will be
extremely important due to the large amount of data.
Management protocols also need to tackle the challenges of
dynamic network topology, prone-to-failure devices,
constrained computing and communication resources,
heterogeneous device platforms and
heterogeneous
applications.
IV.

KEY MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONALITIES OF THE IOT

The OSI network management model developed by ISO

has defined five key network management functions, namely
fault management, configuration management, accounting
management, performance management and security
management. This also applies to the IoT.

1) Fault Management: fault management performs

network monitoring and detects abnormal operations. In order
to localize a fault, a sequence of diagnostic tests may be
carried out. In response to a fault, actions which can bypass or
repair the fault will be launched. Usually, fault management
also logs error information.
2) Configuration Management: configuration management
maintains an accurate inventory of network resources (i.e.
hardware, software and communication links). It also updates
resource allocation according to changes in service
requirements and changes in system states. In order to fulfill
these functionalities, it must track all changes made to
network resources.
3) Accouting Management: accounting management
identifies cost for use of network resources, and gathers usage
statistics for users. It provides information for billing and
charging individual users or service subscribers.
4) Performance Management: performance management
takes care of the monitoring of network resource utilization. It
needs to ensure that user service level objectives are met while
the network resources are utilized in a cost-efficient way. It
usually adopts some network management protocol to
regularly gather network performance data such as network
response time, packet loss rates, link utilization, etc. It
performs performance evaluation and reports that to
administrators. It may trigger fault diagnosis and network
reconfiguration.
5) Security Management: security management mainly
takes care of network access control and information
protection. It includes managing network authentication,
authorization and auditing such that any user only has access
to appropriate network resources. It also regularly gathers
security-related information and analyzes them. In response to
security threats, it may involve the tasks of configuring
network firewalls, intrusion detection systems and security
policies. To protect information from being disclosed and
modified, cryptography is usually adopted. Algorithms and
keys used to encrypt messages are also managed by security
management.
V.

REQUIREMENTS ON THE IOT MANAGEMENT

Considering different factors such as the interoperability

with infrastructure networks, the resource constraints of the
IoT, the prone-to-failure characteristic, fast changing topology
and other dynamics in the IoT, there are many requirements
imposed on the IoT management.
1) Interoperability with Infrastructure Networks: the IoT
management should allow an easy interoperation with the
infrastructure networks especially the Internet. This means the
protocols and interfaces used in the IoT management should
also be able to be easily supported by the Internet
management. Ideally, Internet management models and
protocols should be extended to support the IoT management.
2) Low Overhead: management should cause as little
overhead as possible for the underlying networks considering

the resource constraints of the IoT. To fulfill this, unnecessary

communication should be avoided. For example, broadcast
and multicast messages could be used to replace unicast
messages if applicable. History query results could be stored
at some proxy points for future queries instead of flooding all
query messages into the network. Message headers and data
should also be compressed if possible.
3) Self-Organizing: the IoT networks are mostly selforganizing networks by themselves. Therefore, the
management for the IoT should also be able to self-organize
itself. In the case of node failure, link failure and other
uncertainties, the IoT management should be able to
automatically detect a change and adapt the management
behavior according to the change.
VI.

A NEW MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE FOR THE IOT

As it is said in Sunzis Art of War, Know yourself. Know

your enemy. You will never be defeated. Efficient
management requires the understanding of the managed
entities status, as well as a set of well defined actions that
could be adopted to manage the entities. In the IoT, system
operation states change fast. Real-time monitoring demands a
set of tools and protocols which could regularly take snapshots
of a managed entitys states and report those to a manager. In
the case of emergency, alerts must also be launched. This kind
of reporting and alerting tasks could be done ideally by a piece
of software called agents which reside inside the managed
entities. In order to perform remote management, there is
another software tool with user interface which is called
manager. The manager could be installed on a management
server. The manager receives configuration inputs from an
administrator, makes configuration changes, sends commands
or queries to the management agents through the help of a
management protocol, and receives query results or alerts from
the management agents through the help of a management
protocol. The manager also maintains a management
information database (MIB) about network-wide system states
(and another way is to distributedly store MIB information at
the places of agents).
What makes IoT different from the Internet is that there are
many autonomous device communication networks such as
sensor
networks,
machine-to-machine
communication
networks and RFID networks. These device communication
networks are connected to the Internet or a cellular network via
an IoT gateway. What we can utilize this network architecture
for our management purpose is that we can have management
agents reside inside devices, a local manager installed at the
place of an IoT gateway, and a remote manager installed
somewhere in the Internet. A sketch map of this IoT
management architecture is shown in Figure 3.
This network management architecture allows the
interoperation of infrastructure network management facilities
with the management facilities residing inside the IoT devices.
In this case, a local manager which resides in a gateway could
function as a cache for received IoT network status and
provides indirect query results after receiving a query request
from a remote manager. By avoiding pushing all queries to the

Figure 3: IoT management architecture

IoT devices, the caching of management information at a local
manager saves the precious energy resources in the IoT
devices. In the case that different management protocols or
different versions of a management protocol are used for the
IoT devices and for the infrastructure networks, a local
manager could function as a proxy by providing translation
services between different protocols.
VII. ADAPTION OF SNMP FOR THE IOT MANAGEMENT
SNMP [2] is a simple network management protocol which
is widely implemented in the Internet. The simplicity and wide
popularity of SNMP decide that it could also be adapted to the
management of the IoT. The adoption of SNMP or a modified
version of SNMP will allow the interoperation of the
management functions between the infrastructure networks and
the IoT-specific networks.
1) Standardized SNMP Communication: the objective of
SNMP is to provide an efficient and standardized protocol for
the communication between the management entities.
Therefore, an important question is how to adapt SNMP
messages for the communication of the IoT management.
Given the structure of IoT management in Figure 3, the
essential communication messages between the management
entities include: The control and configuration messages sent
from a manager to an agent; the regular monitoring messages
sent from an agent to a manger; and the alarming messages
sent from an agent to a manager. According to [2], SNMP has
provided different PDUs (i.e. protocol data units) which could
serve the management communication purposes here. For the
control and configuration, a SetRequest PDU can be sent from
a manager to an agent, and the destined agent could reply with
a GetResponse PDU. For the monitoring purpose, a
GetRequest PDU could be sent by a manager to one or a group
of agents, and the destined agents could reply with a
GetResponse PDU. For the alarming messages, a SetRequest
PDU could be sent from a manager to an agent to specify the
desired alarm types and their thresholds, and a Trap PDU or
an InformRequest PDU (which is standardized in SNMP v2
[8]) could be used to send alarm messages when the alarm
conditions are fulfilled.
2) Extensions of SNMP Communication: the IoT is
characterized by a large number of cheap and simple devices
connected to an infrastructure network via a gateway. Since

the large number of cheap and simple devices within an

autonomous network may only perform similar tasks (e.g.
temperature sensing), it could be efficient by broadcasting or
multicasting the same management configuration/control
messages to multiple recipients. However, the standard SNMP
protocol has not specified any broadcast/multicast PDUs, it
has been suggested in [9] that Boradcast/Multicast SNMP
messages should be adopted by SNMP for its application over
IPv6-enabled low power communications such as the situation
in the IoT. Another extension suggested in [9] is the Periodic
GetRequest PDU and the Stop PeriodicGet PDU. This
extension is vital for the IoT from an energy efficiency point
of view. As regular monitoring messages are expected to be
sent from devices to a manager, it is desired that this periodic
data reporting is only requested once by the manager. In order
to cease the process of periodic data reporting, A Stop
PeriodicGet PDU should also be defined. Other modifications
of SNMP could be the compression of SNMP messages to
save the energy consumption. In order to perform compatible
operation between the extended SNMP and a standardized
SNMP, a proxy should be implemented for protocol
translation. Considering the fact that the extended version of
SNMP may only be implemented in the IoT-specific networks,
this proxy could be implemented as a standard function of IoT
gateways. In Figure 3, the local manager could also function
as a proxy between the IoT management agents and a remote
manager located inside the infrastructure network.

VIII. CONCLUSIONS
Internet of Things (IoT) is a new communication paradigm
which has many similarities to the traditional networks, but
also many IoT-specific characteristics. In this paper, we present
management architecture for the Internet of Things. Important
management functions and requirements are discussed. We
also suggest the adoption of SNMP in the IoT management.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is done under the framework of the Finnish
Tekes-funded SHOK programme on the Internet of Things
(TIVIT Oy).
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]

L. Atzori, A. Iera, G. Morabito, The Internet of things: a survey,

Computer Networks, vol. 54, issue 15, 2010, pp. 2787-2805.
RFC 1157, A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), May
1990.
RFC 5424, The Syslog Protocol, March 2009.
RFC 5101, Specification of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)
Protocol for the Exchange of IP Traffic Flow Information, January 2008.
RFC 4741, NETCONF Configuration Protocol, December 2006.
RFC 2865, Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS),
June 2000.
RFC 3588, Diameter Base Protocol, September 2003.
RFC 3416, Protocol Operations for Version 2 of the Simple Network
Management Protocol (SNMPv2), December 2002.
H. Choi, N. Kim, and H. Cha, 6LoWPAN-SNMP: Simple Network
Management Protocol for 6LoWPAN, 2009 11th IEEE International
Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications.