Intelligent agents in network management : a state of the art
Morsy M. Cheikhrouhou, Pierre Conti, Jacques Labetoulle · 1998
Networks will soon be the keystone to all industries. However, the Network Management Systems (NMS) that are currently available are not adapted to the wide spectrum of network installations and configurations. Emerging technologies like CORBA for example, do not seem to be able to solve the problems of complexity, cost and scalability. Different studies are on the way to distribute the intelligence to the different network components as a logical answer to these issues. Among them, the Intelligent Agent (IA) paradigm seems to be the most promising solution. This paper-after a short resume of the issues surrounding NMS and an introduction to the IA concepts- presents a synthesis on current research on the IA for NM. It begins by discussing the management by delegation paradigm, and then goes on to discuss the different ways mobile agents are being proposed for NM frameworks. The remainder of the paper addresses IA based NM approaches according to agent architecture and cooperation. Finally, the paper presents the perspectives and the potential benefits of IAs in NM.