Multiprotocol management agents: a look at an implementation and the issues to consider

This paper discusses the implementation of a multiprotocol management agent. While there are numerous implementations of agents that allow for management of objects using one protocol or the other, few implementations provide for management of the same set of objects over multiple protocols. To be manageable over multiple protocols, the managed objects have to be modeled according to the different management models as well as resolve the management protocol related differences. Additional requirements may be imposed on the multiprotocol management agent to render the subagents and the protocol entities independent of the multiple protocols and management models. The differences between the multiple management mechanisms involved and the need to support future mechanisms imply that efficient implementations of management agents must converge the multiple management mechanisms into a generic local mechanism. The management agent described in this paper allows for the management of a generic network device such as a gateway. The network device operates at the transport-layer level of several communication protocol stacks and therefore, has several modules to be managed, corresponding to the lower layers of each protocol stack