Mobile agents - enabling technology for active intelligent network implementation

Abstract

The emerging notion of active networks describes the general vision of communication network evolution, where the network nodes become active because they take part in the computation of applications and provision of customized services. In this context mobile agent technology and programmable switches are considered as enabling technologies. This article looks at the impact of mobile agent technology on telecommunication service environments, influenced by the intelligent network (IN) architecture. The authors illustrate how the integration of mobile agent platforms into IN elements, notably into the IN switches, will realize an active IN environment. This enables telecom services implemented through mobile service agents on a per user basis to be instantly deployed at programmable switching nodes, which results in better performance and fault tolerance compared to traditional IN service implementations

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.…”

“…By moving computation away from a central network operations center (NOC) via mobile code, these schemes use distribution to achieve scalability [4,5,6,17,20]. Furthermore, having a programmable management platform in theory makes it easier to customize management applications to particular networks or to quickly take new management actions (for example, a response to a new virus or denial-of-service attack).…”

End to End IP QoS Assurance Using Policy Based Multi-Agents SLA Management Systems

“…Mobile agent technology is now J recognized concept for distributed systems management [7]. In fact, mobile agents are widely used to solve problems encountered in large scale distributed and real-time systems where the volume and com ;:.exity of the interactions make it difficult to implement clas sical client-server solutions.…”

Management of advanced services in H.323 Internet protocol telephony

“…An agent can be described as a software component that performs a specific task autonomously on behalf of a person or an organization [16]. It contains some level of intelligence, ranging from predefined rules to self-learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) mechanisms.…”

“…It should be noted that MA architectures for traditional IN services in the PSTN [16] and Internet services [24] have already been proposed. The use of CORBA and Java for multimedia services has also been proposed [20] as has the integration of IN and Internet services [21].…”