Towards plug-and-play networks with mobile code

The telecommunication networks that are in service today are usually conglomerates ofheterogeneous, very often incompatible, multi-vendor environments. Management of suchnetworks is a nightmare for a network operator who has to deal with proliferation of human-machine interfaces and interoperability problems. Network management is operator-intensivewith many tasks that need to be handcrafted and controlled by humans. The legacy networkmanagement systems are very strongly rooted in the client/server model of distributedsystems. This model applies to both IEFT (Case et al., [2]) and OSI (Yemini, [11]) standards.In the model, there are many agents providing access to network components andconsiderably fewer managers that communicate with the agents using specialized protocolslike SNMP or CMIP. The agents are providers (servers) of data to analyzing facilitiescentered on managers. Very often a manager has to access many agents before any intelligentconclusions can be drawn and presented to human operators. The process involvessubstantial amounts of data transmissions that add a considerable strain on the throughput ofthe network. A delegation of authority has been proposed (Yemini, [10]) to address thatissue. Delegation techniques require appropriate infrastructure that provides homogeneousexecution environment for delegated tasks. One approach to the problem is SNMPscript(Case and Levi, [5] with serious constraints related to its limited expression as aprogramming language and to the limited area of its applicability (SNMP only). Althoughdelegation is quite a general idea, the static nature of management agents still leaves theconsiderable control in the domain of the manager. The legacy network management systemstend to be monoliths that are hard to maintain and require substantial processing resources.They experience as well problems with the synchronization of their databases and the actualstate of the network. That synchronization can be improved by increasing the frequency ofupdates or polling with further severe consequences on the performance of the system andthe network.An emerging technology that provides the basis for addressing problems with the legacysystems is network computing based on the Java technology (Gosling et al., [4]). We refer toJava as a technology rather than only as another programming language. Java incorporatesfacilities to implement innovative management techniques based on mobile code (Kotay andKlotz, [6]; also [8]). With these techniques we can harness many interoperability issues andwork toward plug-and-play networks by applying mobile agents that can take care of manyaspects of configuring and maintaining networks in an autonomous way. Code distributionand extensibility techniques keep maintainability of networks and management facilitiesunder control. The data throughput problem can be addressed by delegation of authority frommanagers to mobile agents that are able to analyze data locally without the need for anytransmission. We can limit the use of processing resources on network components throughperiodic execution of certain tasks by visiting agents. Through engineering of a suite ofsimple management tools based on Web standards we address the problems inherent tomonolithic systems that result from their size and processing requirements. With a userinterface based on standards, we lower the learning curve for network operators.Incorporating intelligent agents that can handle tasks autonomously, we limit therequirements for human attention in the management process.In this paper, first, we introduce the necessary infrastructure for mobile code that wedesigned and implemented in Java. The infrastructure includes the following necessarycomponents:• mobile code daemon,