Programmable agents for flexible QoS management in IP networks

Network programmability seems to be a promising solution to network managem ent and quality of service (QoS) control. Software mobile-agents technology is boosting the evolution toward application-level control of network func tionalities. Code may be deployed in the network dynamically and on demand for the benefit of applications or application classes. Agents support a dy namic distribution of control and management functions across networks, thu s increasing flexibility and efficiency. We propose to use mobile-agent tec hnology to overcome some of the problems inherent in current Internet techn ology. We focus our attention to QoS monitoring, being locally significant in network subdomains, and realize a QoS management strategy in response to variations of user, customer of application requirements, and of the netwo rk state. We describe our experience and the results obtained from our test bed, where software agents are instantiated, executed, migrated, and suspen ded in order to implement flexible QoS management in IP networks.