Enabling mobile agent technology for intelligent bulk management data filtering

The intrinsic scalability limitations of traditional centralised network management (NM) become significantly more pronounced when transfers of bulk network monitoring data are considered. This fact has encouraged a trend towards distributed management intelligence, which promises more flexible and scalable solutions. However, distributed mobile agent (MA) based NM architectures reported in the literature do not adequately address scalability problems when considering data-intensive NM applications. In this paper, we present three novel applications in which MA are used to perform management data aggregation, acquire SNMP table snapshots and filter SNMP table contents subject to filtering expressions. Both real-time and off-line NM data acquisition is considered. The applications, supported by a lightweight management framework described in previous work, are shown to outperform SNMP-based polling in terms of bandwidth consumption.