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 networks. In particular, in the area of network management, mobile agents can lead to a fully distributed paradigm, which can overcome the limitation of the traditional centralised approaches. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is to define high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources - data and services - provided by the network nodes. On this base, the paper describes the MARS coordination architecture for mobile agents. MARS is based on the definition of programmable tuple spaces associated to the network nodes: mobile agents can access to 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 behaviour of the tuple space in response to the agents accesses, thus leading to a flexible network model. Several examples show the effectiveness of the MARS approach in supporting network management activities