Project topic/title

Network Management using Mobile Agents Framework (MAF)

Group Name

AISY

Roll #                                                  Name

Group Members

1) 2003-02-0218                       Yasir Siddique Sheikh

2) 2003-02-0018                       Ali Bilal Aslam

3) 2003-02-0079                       Ibrar Javed

4) 2003-02-0188                       Shahzad Ismail Mian

Abstract

There is a trend towards increasingly heterogeneous networks in today’s communicating environments. There are various issues involved in managing these networks. Some of these issues include fault management, accounting management, configuration management, performance management and security management. There are many techniques which can be used to perform the above-mentioned tasks, normally a conventional client-server architecture is used which is centralized in nature. This centralized architecture has some inherent problems which include increased bandwidth consumption, lacking adapting load balancing and problems caused by intermittent network connections. To solve these issues, a new paradigm is hereby presented, known as MAF i.e. Mobile Agents Framework.

 Mobile Agents are independent piece of code that can migrate from one node/host to another. On reaching a certain destination host they make use of the host resources, use the host CPU to execute their own instructions and release resources when they have carried out agents’ work. Mobile Agents have the capability to take with them their code as well as their state of execution when migrating from one node to another. Apart from code mobility, they can also provide CPU load balancing facility – by migrating to a host with less loaded CPU- in a networked environment. Some of the features that make mobile agents so valuable are that they are reactive, autonomous, goal-oriented, temporally continuous, communicative, learning and flexible. The instructions that mobile agents carry execute different tasks on the host machine. For example it can make a log of all the servers running, the resources held by each server, the network communication going on through each server and so on. Using mobile agents, the whole state of the network can be seen and logged. Based on the state information various faults, errors, network loops etc. can be detected and can be corrected.

We would implement a mobile-agent based distributed system that would be able to perform network management tasks. One of the major tasks is Fault Management, which includes Fault Diagnosis and Error Recovery. In order to accomplish this task we will be using mobile agents, which could migrate to other nodes and gather information relevant to various parameters related to Fault Diagnosis. The agents could return to a common point of origin at a more appropriate time and report any faults accordingly.

Item                                                      Due Date

List of Final Deliverables

·        Proposal                                          End of week 2

·        Analysis and Design, SRS              Start of week 10       

·        Implementation and Testing           Start of week 16

Client Information

(If any)

Academic Project

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Zartash Afzal Uzmi