Using mobile agents for distributed Network Performance Management

The intrinsic limitations of traditional centralised Network Management (NM), such as information bottlenecks and lack of flexibility, have encouraged a trend towards distributed management intelligence. Although several distributed NM architectures, exploiting the advantages of Mobile Agents (MA) have been recently proposed, when considering Network Performance Management (NPM) they fail to address scalability problems. In this paper, we describe a secure and fault-tolerant management framework based on MAs, which addresses these limitations by introducing two efficient, lightweight polling modes. Both real-time and off-line NM data acquisition is considered. An in-depth performance analysis of the introduced polling modes, in a data-intensive NPM application is also undertaken. The two modes are shown to outperform SNMP-based polling both in terms of response time and bandwidth consumption.