Enhancing enterprise network management using SMART

Abstract

Network management is one of the important areas in todaypsilas computing world. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is the definition of high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources data and services provided by the network nodes. Most of the network management platforms are based on polling-based centralized SNMP management model which has the limitations like need for maintaining a central intelligence, bandwidth consumption etc... So, in the area of network management, mobile agent technology can lead to a fully distributed paradigm to overcome the limitations of traditional centralized approaches by, minimizing bandwidth consumption, supporting network load balancing, enhancing scalability as well as flexibility, increase fault tolerance and solve problems caused by unreliable network connections. Despite of its many practical benefits, mobile agent technology results in significant new security threats from both malicious agents and hosts. And also, most of the today mobile agent systems are very resource demanding both for the client and the server. In this paper we propose a hierarchical network management framework based on mobile agent technology for enterprise networks that makes it possible to manage heterogeneous devices in flexible and reliable manner. We present a management architecture that supports distributed network management, flexible coordination and runtime topology discovery in order to manage dynamic evolving network components. We also propose a security mechanism at various levels in the hierarchy to protect agents and their state.