APPLICATION OF MOBILE AGENTS IN NETWORK MANAGEMENT

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Date
2014-07
Authors
ISAH, Hamidu
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Abstract
According to Case et al., (1990) and Pinheiro et al., (1999), the present day ways of managing network systems as represented by Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) are based on the centralized client-server approach. In this approach, the central server (manager) retrieves raw management data from all the clients (network elements) being managed. This raw data is centrally collated and processed by the server for every management cycle. This is good enough for small, reliable and fast networks that are particularly localized in nature. In present-day situation where networks extend across cities, regions, countries, and continents; as well as in mobile applications where connected links are very slow and expensive, this may lead to inefficiency in terms of bandwidth utilization, resource wastage, processing bottleneck on the server, and other problems that could be caused by communication failures between the server and the clients being managed. The objective of this work is to demonstrate that a more efficient approach to Network Management could be achieved by implementing a distributed system through the use of Mobile Agents (MA). Typically, Biesoczad et al., (1998) and Gavalas et al., (1999) were among the early researchers who investigated the concept and possibilities of using Mobile Agents in the management of network components. Using this concept, a central manager generates software agents and dispatches them with predefined itinerary and specific network management tasks; visiting each network element to be managed; retrieving, analyzing, and only returning computed results back to the central manager from where the agents originated. This way, the central manager does not need to pull in huge volume of raw management data from the many dispersed network elements being managed for central processing. This conserves expensive network vi bandwidth, relieves the central server of the mundane task of processing raw management data that could result in processing bottleneck, and ensures that only computed results get transmitted to the central server for display to the network administrator. JAVA Agent Development Environment (JADE) platform was used to develop a Mobile Agent based network management system. Issues covered by this research include Status monitoring of network elements, simple network management protocol table filtering, and Global filtering on a UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) network environment that spanned across five cities (Abuja, Bauchi, Enugu, Kaduna, and Lagos) in Nigeria. MA’s were generated and dispatched by a central server in Abuja, visiting network elements to be managed in Bauchi, Enugu, and Lagos. In each case, volume of data in bytes transferred in both directions as well as transit time in seconds taken by this data were noted. Results were compared with those obtained from the same experiments conducted using SNMP approach. Final analysis shows that while performance was slower using MA as compared to SNMP approach, bandwidth utilization was far much better with MA. Even the slower performance exhibited by MA was mainly due to the JADE platform used during the implementation stage. Other studies have shown that better throughput is attainable using other development platforms. Also covered by this work are some security issues relating to mobile agents in a networked environment.
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A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF A MASTER DEGREE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS, FACULTY OF SCIENCE AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA NIGERIA JULY, 2014
Keywords
APPLICATION,, MOBILE,, AGENTS,, NETWORK,, MANAGEMENT.
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