Mobile Agent Coordination for Distributed Network Management

Mobile agents are a promising technology to face the problems raised by the increasing complexity and size of today's networks. In particular, in the area of network management, mobile agents can lead to a fully distributed paradigm to overcome the limits of traditional centralized approaches. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is the definition of high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources—data and services—provided by the network nodes. On this basis, this paper describes the MARS coordination architecture for mobile agents. MARS is based on the definition of programmable tuple spaces associated with the network nodes: mobile agents can access the local resources and services via the tuple space, thus adopting a standard and high-level interface. The network administrator—via mobile agents—can dynamically program the behavior of the tuple space in reaction to the agents' access to the tuple space, thus leading to a flexible network model. Several examples show the effectiveness of the MARS approach in supporting network management activities.