Topology discovery for network fault management using mobile agents in ad-hoc networks

Managing today's complex and increasingly heterogeneous networks requires in-depth knowledge and extensive training as well as collection of very large amount of data. Fault management is one of the functional areas of network management that entails detection, identification and correction of anomalies that disrupt services of a network. The task of fault management is even harder in ad-hoc networks where the topology of the network changes frequently. It is very inefficient if not impossible to discover the ad-hoc network topology using traditional practices of network discovery. We propose a mobile multi agent system for topology discovery that will allow fault management functions in ad-hoc network. Comparison to current mobile agent based topology discovery systems is also presented