Optimal itinerary planning for mobile agents-based management

Proposed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, fail to address scalability problems, when monitoring tasks employing multi-hop agents are considered. This is because they lack mechanisms, which can guarantee that the agents itinerary is optimised so as to minimise migration traffic and round-trip latency. Herein, we propose an algorithm that adapts methods usually applied for addressing network design problems in the problematic of MA itinerary planning. The algorithm not only suggests the optimal number of MAs that minimise the overall cost but also constructs optimal itineraries for each of them. The algorithm implementation has been integrated into our MA framework research prototype while its validity and competence has been verified through simulation results over large enterprise networks.