A decentralised and extensible system of Java concurrent objects to monitor and control TCP/IP networks

This paper presents a decentralised architecture that is comprised of a set of scripts, agents and concurrent objects that interact among them to perform thee tasks of monitoring and control of the devices resources and processes that are interconnected by means of a TCP/IP network. The scripts perform network management tasks and can be deployed and executed in the managed nodes on demand by using a set of cooperative agents. Concurrent objects abstract the network elements. They act autonomously to monitor the state of the network elements and can perform corrective actions on them if a malfunctioning is detected. Executing the scripts through the agents does this. Besides, it is possible to interact remotely with a concurrent object by using rules in first predicate order logic. A rule allows expressing actions that the object has to perform if it has reached a given state. The system has been developed almost entirely in Java and it is a good example of how the centralised framework proposed by SNMP can coexist with a decentralised architecture in which the distribution of control, processing and intelligence of the management tasks is obtained.

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