Advanced network monitoring applications based on mobile/intelligent agent technology

Mobile Agents (MA) have been proposed as a solution for distributed Network Management (NM). However, most MA-based infrastructures exhibit scalability limitations when data intensive management applications are considered. Therefore, we present three novel applications, tailored to transfers of bulk network monitoring data, in which MAs are used to perform data aggregation, acquire atomic SNMP table views and support selective retrieval of SNMP table objects that meet specific selection criteria. The proposed applications are supported by a lightweight management framework described in previous work. A quantitative evaluation, in terms of bandwidth usage, shows that these applications surpass SNMP-based polling performance.