Mobile agents for aggregation of network management data

Operators of telecommunications networks dedicate significant human and capital resources to managing their networks. Current network management approaches, however, do not scale well in dynamically evolving and expanding networks, cannot easily be customized for (or by) human users and involve high overhead costs. We desire to collect management-related data across a changing domain of networked components and to periodically compute aggregated statistics or infer events based on that data. These aggregated results must be generated in a way that is minimally "intrusive" into other network operations, yet are produced with the desired periodicity. To do this, the aggregation process must be adaptive to changing environmental conditions. Such requirements suggest that these aggregation operations must be distributed throughout the network, rather than centralized at a single platform. We describe a conceptual model of an "aggregation network" of adaptive mobile agents for this purpose and describe the operation of a testbed for demonstrating simple aggregation network concepts using mobile-agent technology.