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.