Intelligent mobile agents: towards network fault management automation

Mobile agents, equipped with intelligence, provide a relatively new technology that will help automate network management activities, which are becoming increasingly data-intensive, thus demanding more direct human manager expertise and involvement. The research reported in this paper is concerned with the design of an intelligent mobile agent, which accomplishes a set of network management tasks delegated to it from the human manager. The agent exploits the mobile code technology to roam the network from one node to another, accessing information from each node, processing this information at each node locally, and carrying the results of this processing during the migration. The agent possesses intelligence that allows it to carry out the tasks without involving the human manager. The objective is to present the manager with a set of conclusions or recommendations rather than large volumes of raw alarm data. This paper focuses on applying an intelligent mobile agent to automate simple fault management tasks and proposes a framework for realizing this automation.