MOBILE AGENT BASED NETWORK MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Network management fundamentally involves monitoring and controlling the devices connected in a network by collecting and analyzing data from them. Majority of present day network management systems operate SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Although the centralized management approach gives network administrators a flexibility of managing the whole network from a single place, it is prone to information bottleneck and excessive processing load at the manager and heavy usage of network bandwidth. Mobile agent based network management overcomes these limitations by distributing the network management functionality. Mobile agents refer plainly to self-contained and identifiable computer programs that can move within the network and act on behalf of the user or another entity. These agents move to the place where data are stored and collect the information the manager wants. The idea of a self-controlled program execution near the data source has been proposed as the next wave to replace the client-server paradigm as a better, more efficient and flexible mode of communication. The mobile agent paradigm proposes to treat the network as multiple agent friendly environments and the agents as programmatic entities that perform tasks for users. Agents can function independent of each other or cooperate to solve problems. Mobile agent based network management is to equip agents with network management capabilities and allow them to issue requests to managed devices after migrating to their place. This work investigates the advantages of using mobile agent (distributed) as opposed to conventional (client-server or SNMP) approach to network management. To exploit the potential of mobile agent technology it also demonstrates the application of two traveling patterns for the mobile agent and their use. Further it incorporates new features like trap generation, active network-management and runtime decision-making to considerably increase the performance of mobile agent based approach to network management.