An intelligent mobile agent framework for distributed network management

Network management (NM) is a critical issue in today's rapidly changing network environment. Existing centralized client-server based network management frameworks suffer form problems such as insufficient scalability, interoperability, reliability, and flexibility, as networks become more geographically distributed. A framework for an Intelligent Mobile Agents (IMA) architecture is proposed using mobile agents to achieve distributed management. The policies that govern the mobile agents' operation are specified by the management entity. The IMA architecture reduces the complexity of network management at the managing entity by delegating part of the management responsibility to the managed network entities. Adding mobility and intelligence to an agent provides many advantages such as extensibility and portability. The intelligence of a mobile agent is used to make dynamic decisions such as finding the next destination, optimizing the travel plan, and detecting link failures, as the agent travels around the network. Experimental results indicate an improvement in overall response time, easy delegation and flexibility.