Advanced network monitoring applications based on mobile/intelligent agenttechnology

Mobile Agents (MAs) have been proposed as a solution for distributed Networ k Management (NM). However, most MA-based infrastructures exhibit scalabili ty limitations when data intensive management applications are considered. Therefore, we present three novel applications, tailored to transfers of bu lk network monitoring data, in which MAs are used to perform data aggregati on, acquire atomic SNMP table views and support selective retrieval of SNMP table objects that meet specific selection criteria. The proposed applicat ions are supported by a lightweight management framework described in previ ous wort A quantitative evaluation, in terms of bandwidth usage, shows that these applications surpass SNMP-based polling performance. (C) 2000 Elsevi er Science B.V. All rights reserved.