Buchanan WJ, Naylor M, ScottAV, "Enhancing
network management using mobile agents",
Proceedings Seventh IEEE International Conference
and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer Based
Systems (ECBS 2000). IEEE
Comput. Soc. 2000, pp.218-226.
(TOC).
Buchanan WJand Naylor M, "Mobile Agents
in Network Management", Visual Systems Journal,
January 2000.
Abstract:
There is a trend toward increasingly heterogeneous
networks in today’s communicating environments.
Managing these diverse networks requires the collection
of large amounts of data from diverse and dispersed
areas of the network. Simultaneously, from a user
perspective there is a greater expectation in terms
of reliability and service from the network. New
management paradigms are being proposed as an alternative
to the centralised, client/server architecture,
and new technologies and programming languages make
them feasible.
There has been an enormous amount of hype regarding
the potential productivity gainsfrom so called intelligent
software agents, a technology that has implications
for new network
management applications. These however require complex
artificial intelligence (AI)
functionality. Where agents can be realistically
of benefit is in those areas concerned with mobility.
Agent mobility addresses some limitations faced
by classic client/server architecture, namely, in
minimising bandwidth consumption, in supporting
adaptive network load balancing and in solving problems
caused by intermittent or unreliable network connections.
This report begins by discussing the usage of mobile
agents and the advantages they may offer over client/server
architectures. We discuss the main requirements
expected from a mobile agent system and its implementation.
Java has enjoyed wide spread acceptance as the programming
language of choice for distributed applications.
We demonstrate how it has the fundamental components
that embrace the requirements from a mobile agent
based system. Three mobile agent development toolkits
are evaluated, Voyager from Object Space, JATLite
and the Aglets Software Development Kit (ASDK) from
IBM. The latter is chosen as our development tool.
A detailed requirements analysis identifies
the task of information retrieval as key to many
distributed management tasks. We then report the
development of
two example prototypes which encompass this generic
task. Using first a client/server based approach
and then a mobile agent based approach we plot the
development lifecycle of both prototypes. Thus we
formulate our evaluation of both system architectures
and offer conclusions as to whether mobile based
systems do offer significant advantages over client/server
based systems.
