Research
Project Description
Recent work at LMU has identified the development of mobile agents as a possible paradigm for the support of network management functions. Whilst this work was directed at the manufacturing system arena, it is clear that other authors (see, for example, papers in the April 2000 issue of Computer Communications) are questioning the continued reliance on the static agent and management platform configuration for increasingly complex communications networks. The combination of these factors and the increasing need for effective and efficient network management requires that the behaviour and efficiency constraints of network management operations are identified and understood.The general objectives of this research project are therefore to study via OPNET simulation the behaviour and performance of a range of network management paradigms in order to determine their operation under a number of different situations. Expected outcomes from this work include recommendations on the appropriateness of different agent designs for different network management operations in different circumstances; specifications of management information required to support these agents; or identification of the protocol and operational requirements necessary to support mobile network management agents.
Recent Findings
Currently, most network management systems operate SNMP. These protocols use the client-server model, on which the management station acts as a client that provides a user interface to the network manager and interacts with agents, which are servers that manage remote access to MIB. In certain circumstances, this client server interaction generates significant traffic that overloads the management station.A distributed paradigm is a revision way to perform management functions when networks grow significantly. In this sense, mobile agent is an option to distribute the network management. These agents move to the place where data are stored and select information the user wants. They decentralise processing and control, and, as a consequence, reduce the traffic around the management station, and distribute processing load. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using a mobile agent as compared to a static agent in alleviating loading created by network management protocols and to investigate the performance behaviour of network management concepts using simulation.
To take advantage of mobile agents for network management, we propose a flexible architecture, which forms a layer over conventional SNMP based management. The architecture provides Java-compliant interfaces to network management services. We propose to use Aglets Software Development Kit as the agent development environment which provides a modular structure, easy-to-use API for programming of mobile agents and excellent documentation. To interact with the SNMP agent we propose to use AdventNet SNMP which provides a set of Java tools for creating cross platform Java and Web-based SNMP network management applications. In order to investigate the performance evaluation using mobile agent, we need to do some analytical solutions including Transmit Model and Route Model. Transmit Model could be used to monitor the performance of a set of managed nodes over a particular interval of time. In Route Model, a mobile agent visits the set of nodes to be managed sequentially. The mobile agent is configured with the list of nodes to be visited during its itinerary and also the SNMP statistics to be analyzed. The behaviour of mobile agents in carrying out network management tasks is assessed by simulation studies using OPNET Modeler. We propose to use multi tier application topologies, which are similar in shape to client server application. The scenarios consist of one client with different number of servers or managed nodes. A fair evaluation can only be achieved with careful selection of simulation parameters including request information, response information and session information.
Initial result on response time received, network operations using static agent show better result on the condition of small number of nodes. In terms of traffic at client side and server side, initial result shows that there is a reduction of traffic received when the number of nodes were increased and mobile agent performance shows better result. In terms of load on the managed node, there is a reduction of load received when the number of nodes were increased and again mobile agents performance shows better results than static agent.
