Enabling Mobile Agent Technology for Legacy Network Management Frameworks

Network management is often considered as one of the application areas with greatest potential for Mobile Agent (MA) technology. However, legacy applications and architectures impose considerable inertia to the deployment of new solutions for network management. For this reason, successful MA infrastructures will need flexible and effortless integration with legacy management frameworks, like the widespread SNMP architecture. This paper presents a set of solutions for the integration of SNMP into MA platforms, to support access to SNMP management resources and to introduce MA-based management services that can be reachable from legacy SNMP-capable applications. Such solutions were successfully applied to the JAMES platform, a joint project from University of Coimbra, Siemens Portugal and Siemens AG.