A mobile agent based approach for network management

Due to the deficiencies of the traditional manager-agent paradigm and the resulting problems of centralized management approaches, it is obvious that a transition to distributed management is required. However, distribution alone is not enough. The network management systems should become more flexible to meet the requirements of the frequently changed network environments. As an emerging technology, mobile agent gives rise to a new and effective method in distributed management. In this paper, a mobile agent based network management approach is presented. First, we compare the traditional manager-agent approach with the proposed method, then the architecture of a prototypical system is briefly introduced. As a main part of this paper, several critical issues in designing such a system are described in detail, such as migration algorithm, fault tolerance, agent communication, etc. Lastly, some open issues are discussed as the directions of future research.