An infrastructure for distributed and dynamic network management based on mobile agent technology

The use of mobile agent technology to distribute and delegate management tasks promises to overcome the scalability and flexibility limitations of the centralised network management paradigm. An efficient, lightweight infrastructure based on mobile agents is described, which addresses these issues by distributing management operations amongst managed devices and hence reduces the processing load and bandwidth usage. A mobile agent generator that facilitates the creation of new mobile agents for additional services is also presented. Our infrastructure is shown to outperform SNMP both in terms of the polling response time and bandwidth consumption when considering data intensive operations.