A Flexible Network Management Environment using Mobile Agent Technology

Abstract

The growth of network in size, in the demand of high availability and in the complexity of management functions requires an efficient, scalable and dynamic network management architecture. Traditional centralized network management architecture can hardly satisfy with this rapid changing network environment. It could suffer from problems such as single point of failure, bottleneck at the manager site and inflexibility. By applying the technology of mobile agent, the load of computing and data processing can be shifted from the manager site to managed devices. This is a novel solution for dealing with the growing size of networks. In this paper, we build a mobile agent execution environment by using the IBM’s ASDK and develop a prototyped network management system by taking the advantages of mobile agent technology. We include two management applications, monitor agent and information retrieval agent, to prove its applicability.