Application-oriented network modeling with mobile agents

Abstract

The research thrust of the Perpetuum project is the use of mobile intelligent agents for network management. Mobile agents are migratory programs that move from one host to another to access remote data and services at their location, rather than transporting the data to a central location. The use of mobile agents affords new opportunities for the distribution of processing and control in network management due to their autonomous and cooperative nature. We envision a network manager as a suite of problem-specific applications that launch andor communicate with autonomous mobile network agents that we call netlets. The intent is to provide an extensible set of tools that shift the operator's focus from MIB browsing to problem-solving. In this poster, we demonstrate this shift by applying mobile agents to network modeling. Instead of regarding the network model as the repository of the network topology, a network model is defined as an application-oriented view of the network. Depending on the application, the view will not only be defined in terms of a set of static components, but also in terms of the dynamic status of these components. The mobile agent implementation of a Network Model Browser is explained, followed by an exploration of innovative extensions that transform this model discovery tool into a problem-browser. 0-7803-4351-4/98/$10.00 0 1998 IEEE

Multi-robot coalition formation

“…To date, agents have been successfully employed in multiple application endeavors like Data Filtering (Jennings and Higuchi, 1992), Pattern Recognition (Vuurpijl and Schomaker, 1998), Event Notification (Tripathi et al, 2004), Planning and Optimization (Fox et al, 2000), Rapid Response Implementation (Chen et al, 2001), and Discovery (Schramm et al, 1998). While this set of applications appears quite diverse, it should be noted that software agents, unlike robots, do not concern themselves with real world physical constraints.…”

Predictable, Lightweight Management Agents

“…There is a significant body of work concerning mobile agents in network management [2,4,6,16,24,17,19,21,22,26]. Bieszczad et al provide a survey [5] that identifies a number of areas in which mobile agents are applicable to network management, including network modeling, fault management, configuration management, and performance management.…”

Analysis on a mobile agent-based algorithm for network routing and management

“…In recent years, many intelligent mobile agent-based network management techniques have been proposed and implemented [22], [23], [24], [25]. In fault diagnosis [23], the server first dispatches to the network and generates mobile agents.…”