A Distributed Network Management Framework Based on Mobile Agents

Traditional approaches to network management are mostly based on the centralized client/server model. Due to the intrinsic limitations of SNMP-based management paradigms, such as information bottlenecks and lack of flexibility, have encouraged a trend towards distributed management system. The emergence of mobile agent frameworks has led many researchers to examine their applicability to network management and control environments. It is believed that mobile agents can provide better solutions at least to performance and fault management problems. In this paper, the fundamental architecture of distributed network management using mobile agents is presented. We also discuss its advantages and how to develop mobile agents using Grasshopper agent platform. Finally, an example of management application implementation based on our framework is briefly described.