Enhancing the performance of mobile agent based network management applications

Mobile agent technology (MAT) seems to promising approach for achieving flexible and decentralised network management. A system independent mobile agent platform is used in order to control the roaming and downloading of the required management code, in the form of mobile agents, onto the network devices. A management task such as the configuration or monitoring of a specific QoS parameter related to a particular application may require that a mobile agent (MA) or a set of MAs should visit several network nodes. We present an approach for enhancing the performance of a mobile agent based network management system by monitoring and controlling the communication paths between the network management applications and the mobile agents. In particular we show that when a mobile agent should act on a set of nodes, the time required to perform a management task is decreased if for the sequence by which the nodes will be visited we take into account the workload on them, i.e. at any time to try to visit the less loaded ones.