Mobile agents for active network management

Abstract

Traditionally, network management systems have been based on client/server technologies comprised of distributed static agents (servers) and a centralized manager (client). The behavior of such systems has proven to be difficult to modify and/or extend. The use of mobile software agents has been introduced as an alternative to traditional centralized network management techniques. Mobile software agents provide a decentralized approach to network management issues because of the distributive nature of the agents themselves. Mobile software agents can be defined as autonomous software components operating within a network. They perform specialized tasks by traversing the network and working independently or in conjunction with other software components. The problem of bottlenecking or network congestion associated with a centralized manager has been shown to be non-existent with the use of mobile software agents. Mobile agents in a broad sense are programs that represent a user in a computer network, and are capable of migrating autonomously from node to node, to perform some computations on behalf of the user. In this paper, they have been introduced in an active network environment to dynamically make required changes in the network and also make dynamic network service innovation attainable.