Mobile software agents for decentralised network and systems management

Mobile Agent (MA) technology has been proposed for Network and Systems Mana gement (N&SM) as an answer to the scalability limitations of centralised mo dels and the flexibility problems of static hierarchical frameworks. Nevert heless, much is still to be done to deploy MA-based management frameworks t hat efficiently cope with the dynamically changing traffic and topological characteristics of modem networks. This paper starts with an extensive revi ew of the research approaches on MA-based management. Then, we propose a hi ghly adaptive and dynamic hierarchical MA-based framework for N&SM that is based on appropriate policies to enable automatic calibration of the manage ment system depending on network conditions. The applicability of the intro duced framework is tested in realistic management scenarios and three appli cations on network monitoring are proposed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.