Building reusable mobile agents for network management

Mobile agents can migrate among nodes to perform a set of management tasks at each of the visited nodes. Existing mobile agent-based network management systems often assume that their mobile agents are designed to work in particular networks to raise the efficiency of agent migration among multiple nodes. Unfortunately, such mobile agents cannot be reused in different networks. This paper proposes a framework where a mobile agent for network management is composed of two kinds of software components, an itinerary part and a behavioral logic part. Both components are implemented as mobile agents. The former is a carrier designed for particular networks, and it can efficiently navigate other mobile agents among nodes in its target network. The latter defines management tasks performed at each node independently of any local network. This framework allows a mobile agent for network management to be reused in various networks without being modified. A prototype implementation of this framework and its application were built on a Java-based mobile agent system.