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Special Issue of the International Journal on Network Management (IJNM) on “Flow‐based Approaches in Network Management: Recent Advances and Future Trends”

The continuous increase of line speeds and loads in modern computer networks has considerably stimulated the usage of aggregation-based monitoring techniques for network management in recent years. Among these, flow-based approaches have become extremely popular among researchers and operators owing to the wide availability of hardware and software flow exporters and their quasistandardized exporting formats, such as Netflow or IPFIX. While flow-based monitoring was originally used in simple diagnosing and accounting tasks, researchers are now proposing flow-based approaches for a wide range of application fields, such as intrusion detection, traffic classification and resource management. New environments, such as clouds and software-defined networks, demand new flow-based solutions for their monitoring and management. Furthermore, we observe more and more attempts to close the gap between packet-based and flow-based monitoring. As the latter was originally proposed as an efficient and feasible alternative to deep packet inspection in high-speed networks, the most recent flow exporters allow enrichment of the exported flow data with application-layer information. It can be expected that this will lead to new approaches and solutions to network management problems. The goal of this Special Issue is to present innovative flow-based approaches and solutions for network management tasks as well as new methods and technologies for the generation, processing and analysis of flow information. Therefore, this Special Issue of the International Journal of Network Management covers ongoing research on the usage of flow-based approaches, the design and implementation of flow-monitoring devices and infrastructures, and emerging trends in flow-based technologies and applications. Tutorial-style articles in these fields are also solicited, if they provide a structured introduction and a clear overview of state-of-the-art technologies, mechanisms or architectures, and newly emerging challenges as well as problems. Contributions in the following areas are of specific interest, but are not limited to: