This paper is available online at www.jtaer.com DOI: 10.4067/S0718-1876201400020000

Centralised network management has shown inadequacy for efficient management of large heterogenous networks. As a result, several distributed approaches have been adapted to overcome the problem. This paper is a review of decentralised network management techniques and technologies. We explain distributed architectures for network management, and discuss some of the most important implemented distributed network management systems. A comparison is made between these approaches to show the pitfalls and merits of each.