Design and analysis of a proactive application management system (PAMS)

Management of large-scale network-centric systems (NCS) and their applications is an extremely complex and challenging task due to factors such as centralized management architectures, lack of coordination and compatibility among heterogeneous network management systems, and the dynamic characteristics of networks and application bandwidth requirements, just to name a few. The goal of this research is to develop a hierarchical framework to achieve end-to-end intelligent proactive network management system that can be used to manage large-scale network-centric systems and their applications. This framework provides the ability to write management programs to manage any required function or property (performance, high assurance, fault, quality of service, etc.) of the network-centric systems and their applications during all the phases of their operations. Our ultimate objective is to consider the management of network-centric systems and applications starting from the design phase and forward rather than being afterthought process. In this paper, we present a framework to develop proactive and adaptive management services and an implementation of a proactive application management system (PAMS) based on that framework. Our implementation approach utilizes delegated mobile agents to implement the management functions required by any network-centric system and/or application. We also present experimental results and evaluation of the management services offered by the PAMS prototype.