Software Agent Constrained Mobility for Network Performance Monitoring

During the recent years of research on mobile agents, significant effort has been directed towards the identification of models of agent mobility suitable for network management applications. Also, a lot of research work is currently being carried out trying to provide an assessment of mobile agent frameworks used to build agent-based network management systems. In this paper we clarify three different models of agent mobility, present a mobile agent-based performance monitoring system that exhibits the “constrained mobility” model, and discuss its practical use for dynamically programming network elements. The implementation of this system is presented and compared with static object approaches. Furthermore we provide a performance evaluation of the mobile agent based system as it compares with Java-RMI and CORBA distributed frameworks, in order to assess the advantages, along with the overheads, of agent solutions.