Scalable Management Strategies using Mobile Agents in Optical Transport Network

Network Management is a critical issue in today’s rapidly changing network environment. Centralized client server networks are having problems such as scalability, reliability, interoperability and flexibility. Mobile agents decentralize the processing and control, thereby reducing the management traffic around the management station and distribute processing load. Network management based-on Mobile Agent refers to equipping agents with network management intelligence and allowing them to issue requests to managed devices/objects after migrating close to them. Client server based model is better for smaller network whereas mobile agents are better for large network. Cost comparison of MA v/s client server with a view to study their comparative performance is shown in this paper. An Application of mobile agent in setting up λconnections through an optical transport network (OTN) is also shown, which includes brief introduction to optical network, OTN layer architecture (a type of optical network), a ROADM switch (which is used for ADD/DROP of optical channels in optical network) and proposed an algorithm to create a logical connection in a node consisting of optical channels. Experimental results for cost comparison show the comparative performance of MA v/s client server.