Advanced Network Management Functionalities through the Use of Mobile Software Agents

Computing power and storage space are more and more distributed over the network. Consequently, management strategies are becoming of crucial importance in order to guarantee an effective control of the system, both in terms of performance and reliability. Mobile agents represent a challenging approach to provide advanced network management functionalities, due to the possibility to easily implement a decentralized and active monitoring of the system. In this paper we discuss how to take advantage of this technology and describe a prototype implementation based on our mobile agent platform called MAP.