Bulk transfers of MIB data

Since the original days of SNMP back in early 1988, the requirements for managing IP-based networks like the Internet have changed considerably. An important change is that the total amount of management information that needs to be transferred has increased greatly. Not only did the size of traditional MIB data grow, for example IP routing tables and TCP connection tables, but also new types of management information appeared, for instance accounting tables, which tend to be bulky. The widely deployed SNMP version 1 was not designed for transferring large amounts of data. The overall latency of such transfers can be quite high and the way in which the SNMP messages are encoded for transmission over the network is not particularly efficient. The new version 3 of the SNMP protocol, while improving on other issues like security and access control, does not improve the transfer of large amounts of MIB data sufficiently, even though it provides a get-bulk operation. In this article, we look into ways of making bulk transfers of MIB data between SNMP agents and managers more efficient. We consider a bulk transfer to be the transfer of several hundreds of kilobytes of MIB data in a single logical transaction.