Graph Model of an IEEE802.1 Based Network Structure and Its Application for Enterprise ICTinfrastructure Discovery Modeling Data Flows Hierarchy of an Enterprise Network’s ICT Infrastructure

A network service provider's ICT-infrastructure (the Network) graph describing the Network's structure at the physical (spatial), network, and data link layer layers (on OSI model), is widely used to solve various network management problems. Since modern ICT-infrastructures do not sufficiently support standard tools for network devices discovery (such as LLDP), there is a need to use heterogeneous data about Network structure with different algorithms of its graph building. Presence of the single Network model for all algorithms will allow to separate the data collection procedures from the data analysis procedures, and formally infer those parts of the graph, information for which is not available or incomplete.

This report includes overview of a graph model that could be used to describe Networks that are built using the IEEE 802.1 standards. The model allows to describe most significant methods of physical and logical Network organization such as link aggregation, VLAN, IP, etc. Also, will be observed model use cases in development of automatized enterprise Network structure discovery algorithms.