Effective Network Monitoring Using Mobile Agents

Fast growth of computer Networks require efficient network management and monitoring tools for better utilization of resources. Traditional centralized Network Management Systems (NMS) are not adapted to wide spectrum of heterogeneous network installations and configurations. Major problem areas are heterogeneity, complex topologies, scalability, limited bandwidth constraints etc. Present research activity is centered around providing distributed network management oriented intelligence to different network components. Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems to offer a good solution. Most network devices employ Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents for network management based on traditional centralized client/server architecture. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Agent Framework (MAF) integrated with SNMP. It provides a mobile network manager with Mobile Agent Generator (MAG) functionality. Generated MA can aggregate SNMP data, semantically compress and intelligently filter it. We present a novel approach to write string based network health functions and SNMP table filtering expression. A new concept of customized reliable traps based on health functions is introduced. Implemented MAF is also strengthened to handle and transfer large SNMP tables