A Network Management Framework Using Mobile Agents

Abstract

Network management of heterogeneous networks is still hard to achieve automatically and efficiently. In this study, we present a framework that has the ability to perform network management tasks on heterogeneous networks using mobile agents. This framework handles the inability of many network devices to run mobile agents. While the main focus of the project is the framework, we present an example of mobile agents that are able to locate a fixed set of network failures and detect the possible causes accurately. Experimental results show that some network management tasks can be more easily executed by mobile agents. In particular, search and diagnostic mobile agents are able to find more precisely a cause of a network failure by finding alternate paths to gather more data about the failure.