Enhancing the efficiency of secure network monitoring through mobile agents

In the current network communication infrastructure, there is a tremendous growth in heterogeneous computer network and proliferation of network traffic which demands efficient and secure network monitoring and network management. Mostly SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) based client server architecture is used for network management which uses SNMP as a protocol to provide centralized approach of network management which is quite efficient in terms of performance. Foremost problems related to this architecture are heterogeneity in networks, limited amount of bandwidth, lack of resources, lack of fault tolerance capability and huge amount of traffic generated on central server which can degrade the performance of network. In this paper we proposed distributed and decentralized approach for the purpose of network monitoring and management which reduces the traffic around management station and alleviate processing load created by management protocol like SNMP. To facilitate distributed and decentralized monitoring, we proposed a secured multi-agent based architecture in which, we created different mobile agents for the purpose of getting network related information. Mobile agents retrieve network related information, which act as an input for network administrator. Network administrator uses this information to enhance the performance of network by managing network traffic and bandwidth utilization of network. Since security risk is the main drawback of mobile agent paradigm, so for this we have used ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography) which provides authentication as well as confidentiality to the monitoring process.