Dynamic Agent Domains in Mobile Agent Based Network Management

Today's network management systems suffer from scalability problems and involve the transmission of large amounts of raw data towards the centralized network management station. Therefore mobile agent (MA) based solutions were presented to enhance the efficiency of network management tasks. The paper investigates the existing MA delegation schemes and migration policies, and proposes a solution for effective agent deployment using dynamic agent domains. The size of the domains is altered during the trading process, where agents exchange nodes in order to equalize their workload using a lightweight communication model. Cloning and merging operations can be initiated to modify the number of agents, providing adaptivity to changing network conditions. The presented method includes the population and load control for network management agents along with robustness and fault tolerance mechanisms to achieve a guaranteed visiting frequency for the managed hosts.

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