Using mobile agents to implement flexible network management strategies

Due to their intrinsic complexity, computer and communication systems require increasingly more sophisticated management strategies to be adopted in order to guarantee adequate levels of performance and reliability. The centralized paradigm adopted by the SNMP is appropriate in several network management applications, but the quick expansion of networks has posed the problem of its scalability, as well as for any other centralized model. Mobile agents represent a challenging approach to provide advanced network management functionalities, due to the possibility to easily implement a decentralized and active monitoring of the system. In this paper we discuss how to take advantage of this technology and identify some reference scenario where mobile agents represent a very promising approach. We also describe a prototype implementation based on our mobile agent platform called MAP and show how it is possible to take advantages from using the features it provides.