Mobile intelligent agents for the management of the information infrastructure

Management within the emerging information infrastructure requires new paradigms for coping with the heterogeneity, distribution, dynamic nature and complexity of the managed resources. Traditional, RPC-based management approaches are not sufficient in this context. The paper discusses the use of Java-based mobile intelligent agents in the field of network and service management. It first presents a Java-based mobile agent platform supporting the management agents. Then based on the mobility framework, the paper describes also an intelligence platform which supports the specification and processing of management solution knowledge implemented as mobile intelligent agents. The management solutions are viewed as Java-based rules, which are organized into a hierarchy by the specialization/generalization relationships among the network situations the management solutions are developed for. The proposed intelligence paradigm and the associated knowledge processing mechanism offer the advantages of object-oriented development in a widely distributed telecommunications environment. This paradigm can be considered as an alternative or complement to the traditional management solutions.