Abstract
The increasing complexity of network architectures and the diverse services operating over them is currently being fuelled greatly by the convergence of telecommunications and data networks. This growth is in itself a driver towards the development of more comprehensive, flexible and scalable management frameworks than those readily available in today’s market such as SNMP, CMIP and Remote Monitoring. Therefore, this paper builds on previous work examining the utility of active processes, or agents, for providing this much needed functionality at the management level. A distributed component architecture is proposed, which allows the construction of agents from component stock. Simulated network devices are embedded with agent execution ‘kernels and populated with standard agents to manage device registration, configuration, security and other operations. Also, the issue of security is addressed through the development of an encryption key exchange scheme between agents and their device hosts to create a ‘web of trust’ amongst participating entities.
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Greenwood, D.P.A. (2000). A Cohesive, Secure Mechanism for Structuring Distributed Agent Populations in Managed Networks. In: Hariri, S., Lee, C.A., Raghavendra, C.S. (eds) Active Middleware Services. The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 583. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8648-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8648-1_6
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