Enabling a Mobile Network Manager (MNM) through mobile agents

Abstract

Network management comprises of monitoring and control of a network. Ideally a network management system should be able to provide the facility of managing the network from any site and from any system and network. However the present network management systems are centralized and tied to particular systems. We introduce the unique concept of a Mobile Network Manager (MNM) to provide network administrators a system and location independent network manager which will be useful under a variety of circumstances. In order to enable the MNM mobile agents have been used. The mobile agents are furnished by the mobile agent environment MAGENTA (Mobile AGENT environment for distributed Applications) which provides autonomous, reactive, proactive and communicative mobile agents. MAGENTA has been designed and implemented to support mobile user aware applications. The mobile agents are used not only to facilitate the disconnected mode of functioning of the MNM but also to decentralize network management functionalities. The applicability and usefulness of mobile agents in implementing the functionalities of MNM has been compared with the client-server mechanism.