Analysis of mobile agents in network fault management

Network domains have become more and more advanced in terms of their size, complexity and the level of heterogeneity. Comprehensive fault management is the most significant challenge in network management. Fault management can help increase the availability of the network by quickly identifying the faults and then, proactively, start the recovery process. Current centralized configured network management systems suffer from problems such as insufficient scalability, availability and flexibility as networks become more distributed. Mobile agents (MAs), with integral intelligence, can present a reasonable new technology that will help to achieve distributed management, several researchers have embraced these approaches. In this paper, we introduce a general analytical model for network management client/server (CS) and MA paradigms. We express how to build up an analytical framework, which can be used to quantitatively assess the performances of the MA and CS paradigms under different scenarios. We present some numerical and experimental results that demonstrate the applicability of our proposed framework, which will be based on a combination of MA and CS schemes called Adaptive Intelligent Mobile Agent.