Application of Mobile Agents in Network Management
CHAPTER ONE
MS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH
Overall, this project work tries to solve the problems listed in section 1.2 by applying a distributed management mechanism which overcomes the limitations posed by the traditional centralized Client/Server architecture as presented by SNMP. The work demonstrates that mobile agents could be used to perform network management functions more efficiently in terms of bandwidth utilization as compared to the traditional SNMP approach that requires a lot of communication bandwidth which effectively reduces its utilization span in terms of network size. According to Bivens et al (1999); Gavalas et al., (2000); Paliafito and Tomarchio (2000); Bohoris et al., (2000); and Griffin et al., (2001); Mobile Agents could be used as a decentralized approach to network management which greatly reduces the workload at the management server location by otherwise delegating network management responsibilities to the network elements being managed. To be able to achieve these desired objectives, the following approaches to network management were extensively reviewed:
- Remote Monitoring (RMON);
- Management by Delegation (MbD); and
- Mobile
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
An introduction to some background knowledge related to this research is provided in this chapter. It begins with a general overview of the present system of network management, namely, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). A brief description of Remote Monitoring (RMON); Management by delegation (MbD); and Mobile Agents (MA) follows. Finally, a detailed overview of the agents software development platform, JADE (Java Agents Development Environment) used to implement the proposed system is given.
OVERVIEW OF NETWORK MANAGEMENT
According to Bohoris et al., (2000), network management has been the subject of intense research over the last decade, with the relevant progress being twofold: on one hand, architectures and algorithms for solving management problems have been devised; on the other hand, different management technologies have been proposed and standardized.
Currently, the network management systems adopt a centralized paradigm, represented by SNMP. Because of its simplicity, it has been adopted worldwide as a standard protocol for managing network objects such as network routers, Local Area Network (LAN) switches, bridges, hubs, workstations, servers, printers, and so forth. Although SNMP is a standard protocol, it has many limitations and inefficiencies. Most of these problems are rooted in SNMP’s centralized architecture. The rational approach to overcome most of these limitations is to distribute the network management operations. There are several ways which have been under investigation, namely, Management by Delegation (MbD), Remote Monitoring (RMON), and the use of Mobile Agents (MA). The following will give brief overviews of those approaches.
Simple Network Management Protocol
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was developed in the late 1980’s to Provide network operators with a simple tool they could use to manage their networks. It has gained widespread acceptance since 1993, making it a standard to manage TCP/IP Networks, including individual network devices, and devices in aggregate. The more sophisticated Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) never replaced SNMP. CMIP has only been deployed in the telecommunication networks and not IP networks. Case et al., (1990) used Figure 1 below to depict the architecture of SNMP. It defines a centralized client/server relationship.
CHAPTER THREE
MATERIALS AND METHODS
This chapter describes the design and implementation of the mobile agent-based network management system. First, the chapter described the system architecture and design; then, presented the implementation details. This system is created on top of the JADE agent platform. The entire code is written in Java.
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
As initially proposed by Bieszczad et al., (1998) and depicted on Figure 3, the system consists of two main parts: Network Manager (NM), and Network Element (NE). At the NM, there is a Manager Agent which first needs to be created and started up. Network administrator uses it to monitor the network status and control the manipulation of the system through its Graphical User Interface (GUI). At each NE, there is a daemon agent which is dispatched by the NM when the NE registers itself into the management domain. At the NM, there are also Mobile Agent Generators (MAG) which could be used to create customized mobile agents.
CHAPTER FOUR
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The current prototype has demonstrated the usefulness of the properties provided by MA to help NM to do the network management. In this Chapter, some related problems that have arisen during the work have been discussed. There are also several interesting future directions that could be explored as an extension of this work. These are:
- security problem, and
- Scalability
SECURITY PROBLEM
Network management normally involves transferring many important management data through the network. Some are critical to the network safe status and disasters may happen if they are eavesdropped and improperly set by malicious users. Reiser and Vogt (2000) assert that introducing the MA into this picture brings new security problems because automatically executing code on any host is potentially dangerous. Thus, security plays a decisive role in terms of acceptance and applicability of agent-based network management system.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
SUMMARY
Traditional network management based on centralized architecture was observed to have some infeasibility and inefficiency problem when the managed networks are large in scale. MA based approaches have been widely investigated to solve those problems. It has several benefits compared to the centralized system:
- Distribution of Management Workload
One of the problems of the centralized system is that most of the work needs to be done at the central manager. It needs to fetch and analyze a lot of the management data. If a large number of NEs are involved, the manager becomes the system bottleneck. MAs could be launched with the task delegated to it, which will automatically finish its job and only return those results to the manager. In this way, the manager is not as loaded and can do more things simultaneously. The other good effect is that many management decision could be taken locally, thus avoiding the transfer of large amount of data back to the manager. As a result, the network bandwidth usage may also be reduced.
- Adaptability and Flexibility
Due to its intrinsic mobility and no need for pre-installation, mobile agents represent a promising technology to cope with changing environment and user mobility.
- Programmability and Customization
Mobile agent could be created and customized according to the user’s request, enabling dynamic programmable functionality to be provided. According to, Bohoris et al., (2000), the customization of mobile agent behavior can provide a powerful mechanism for “intelligence on demand”. In this thesis, it was outlined how users could use class inheritance to customize basic performance monitoring functions to their needs.
CONCLUSION
While mobile agent has many superior features over centralized network management approach, it has some performance overhead and other related problems. Due to the agent migration, normally Remote Method Invocation (RMI), serialization and de- serialization, these create some latency, which might be a problem. Security is also a crucial issue of mobile agent, especially in the network management domain where more secure environment needs to be provided.
In conclusion, it is believed that mobile agent, as a promising approach to network management, could provide a new range of opportunities in the future. But a lot of research is still needed to reach an acceptable usage of MA technology in network management domain.
RECOMMENDATION AND FUTURE WORK
As described in chapter 4, some efforts have been made to make the system more secure. But given the extensive scope of security as it relates to network management as a whole, a complete software implementation of the system is beyond the scope of this work. A detailed design and implementation of the whole secure framework should be considered as a future work.
The current system implemented is only used for network status monitoring and some performance management applications. Enormous number of potential services are possible in the area of network fault and configuration management. More researchers and manufacturers are interested in combining intelligent agents and mobile agents in the area of proactive fault management. To, allow mobile agent to have some properties of intelligence and self-healing might help the automation of network management.
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