Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory This document describes a management architecture suitable for deployment in challenged networking environments for the configuration, monitoring, and local control of application services. Challenged networking environments exhibit interruptions in end-to- end connectivity and communications delays that are both long-lived and unpredictable. Even in these challenging conditions, such networks must provide some type of end-to-end information transport and fault protection while also supporting configuration and performance reporting. This management may need to operate without human- or system-in-the-loop synchronous interactivity and without the preservation of transport-layer sessions. In such a context, challenged networks must exhibit behavior that is both determinable and autonomous while maintaining as much compatibility with non- challenged-network operational concepts as possible. The architecture described in this document is termed the Asynchronous Management Architecture (AMA). The AMA supported two types of asynchronous behavior. First, the AMA does not presuppose any synchronized transport behavior between managed and managing devices. Second, the AMA does not support any query-response semantics. In this way, the AMA allows for operation in extremely challenging conditions, to include over uni-directional links and cases where delays/disruptions would otherwise prevent operation over traditional transport layers, such as when exceeding the Maximum Segment Lifetime (MSL) of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).