ATM network discovery using mobile agents

With the proliferation of new networking technologies, and the demand for new services, it will become increasingly difficult, and nearly impossible, to manage large-scale networks without an intelligent, automated management system. Discovering and keeping track of the topology of a network is essential for effective network management. We introduce a distributed algorithm for discovering the connectivity graph of an ATM network using intelligent mobile agents. In the proposed scheme links are discovered in a distributed fashion, thereby making this approach significantly more scaleable than applications using the traditional client/server model and SNMP.