Mobile Agents for Network Managment

• Main Author: 王佳瑞
• Other Authors: 王宗一
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/38663188961920426412

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工程科學系 === 88 === The main purpose of this paper is to design and implement a mobile agent framework for distributed network management. By the mobility and the autonomy of mobile agents, we can improve the efficiency of network management and reduce the traffic load caused by exchanging information. For the time being, network management frameworks are mostly centralized. As new distributed systems and applications emerge daily, centralized managing technology begins to show nadequate in extensibility, interactivity, reliability, and flexibility. Message passing and information exchanging between network manager and managed stations that distributed over different places will increase the traffic load of network and make the efficiency down. To overcome these problems, new distributed network management architectures are being proposed by researchers all over the world. Of them using mobile agent framework for distributed network management is a fairly new concept, but is seeing promising results. The major idea of using mobile agents is to shift some managing work from management station to managed nodes (devices) to reduce network traffics. Mobile agents are launched to carry managing instructions to managed nodes; they then bring back status information of these nodes to the managing station. Status polling activities are greatly reduced, and thus network traffics too. Also, the inherent extensibility, interactivity, reliability and flexibility of a mobile agent framework make it a perfect technology for distributed network management. In this research, we use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and TCP/IP protocols for the network management and communication, and MACE (Mobile Agent Carrier Environment) system developed ourselves for the execution environment of mobile agent. The implementation of all system follows the Agentlet-Serverlet architecture of MACE and will be compatible to the network devices today. The prototype of the framework will serve as a testbed for developing distributed network management technologies and their applications.