Exploiting Code Mobility in Decentralized and Flexible Network Management

Network management is gaining increasing importance due to the pervasiveness of computer networks. Nevertheless, mainstream approaches to network management are presently limited by centralized management strategies and poor flexibility—a consequence of their rigid client-server architecture. In this paper we analyze how to overcome these problems by new design paradigms and technologies encompassing the capability to relocate dynamically the components of a distributed application. We evaluate the opportunities offered by this approach and provide feasibility considerations, also discussing a few interim architectural solutions adopted in our on-going implementation work.