Mobile Software Agents for Network Monitoring and Performance Management
Damianos Gavalas · 2001
The rapid developments in the area of communication and data networks require highperformance and reliable Network and Systems Management (NSM). Due to the deficiencies of the traditional manager-agent paradigm and the resulting scalability and flexibility limitations of centralisation, it is now commonly agreed that a transition to distributed management is required. There are many new trends in NSM that try to address this requirement. In general, these trends make use of well-established techniques from other computing fields, e.g. distributed objects, Java and Web technologies, adapted to NSM problems. In addition, management distribution aspects have also been incorporated in both the Internet and OSI-SM management architectures. However, it has been shown that distribution alone is not enough. Due to the high frequency of changes in networking environments, it is imperative that management systems are flexible, i.e. they can dynamically adapt to those changes and allow on-the-fly customisation of management services. In that context, Management by Delegation (MbD) paradigm has been identified as the first promising approach towards management distribution and flexibility.