Efficient polling protocol for the management information gathering over TCP/IP

The polling protocol that gathers the management information of the network is important features of the network performance. This paper shows the design of the polling protocol that can gather management information from agents in an efficient way. Existing polling protocols - current polling with the same polling intervals, separated polling with the different intervals - have some defects that the probability of network congestion and the burden of a manager station, or both very high and if the individual polling cycle decreases, manager station will retrieve many overlapped responses, and consequently the burden of a manager station increases. The other protocol, shuttle protocol can get rid of these problem, but it also some overheads such as error handling method and the complexity of protocol structure, etc. The polling protocol which have designed in this paper can mend these weak point. And the goal of the design is the simplicity of the protocol and the reduction of the management traffic.