Design and Implementation ofa Network Search Node

Abstract: Networked systems, such as cloud infrastructures, are growing in size and complexity.They hold and generate a vast amount of configuration and operational data, whichis maintained in various locations and formats, and changes at various time scales.A wide range of protocols and technologies is used to access this data for networkmanagement tasks. A concept called ‘network search’ is introduced to make all thisdata available in real-time through a search platform with a uniform interface, whichenables location-independent access through search queries. Network search requires a network of search nodes, where the nodes have identicalcapabilities and work cooperatively to process search queries in a peer-to-peer fashion.A search node should indicate good performance results in terms of low query responsetimes, high throughputs, and low overhead costs and should scale to large networkedsystems with at least hundred thousands nodes. This thesis contributes in several aspects towards the design and implementation of anetwork search node. We designed a search node that includes three major components,namely, a real-time data sensing component, a real-time database, and a distributedquery-processing component. The design takes indexing of search terms and concurrencyof query processing into consideration, which accounts for fast response timesand high throughput of search queries. We implemented a network search node as asoftware package that runs on a server that provides a cloud service, and we evaluatedits performance on a cloud testbed of nine servers. The performance measurementssuggest that a network search system based on our design can process queries at lowquery latencies for a high query load, while maintaining a low overhead of computationalresources.