Models and analysis of trade-offs in distributed network management approaches

This paper develops an analytical framework to model and compare different distributed approaches for network monitoring. The performance of each scheme is evaluated in terms of traffic, completion time, and processing and memory resources. It is shown that distributed approaches have considerable advantages over traditional centralized network management, but a single distributed approach may not be best for all applications. Analytical results suggest that the weak mobility approach performs well for routine monitoring, and the mobile agent approach is well suited for searching types of applications. However, the best approach for a given application will depend on many parameters requiring careful quantification.