Paper Info
Title
Hierarchical network management: a scalable and dynamic mobile agent-based approach
Abstract
Several distributed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, have been recently proposed to answer the scalability limitations of centralised models and the flexibility problems of static hierarchical frameworks. Yet, although agent-based management frameworks have recently started evolving from the early 'flat' models to hierarchical structures, they cannot efficiently cope with the dynamically changing traffic and topological characteristics of modern networks. This is mainly due to the limited use of agent mobility (employed either through mid-level manager entities or between static mid-level managers and managed devices) and lack of appropriate policies enabling automatic calibration of the management system based on network conditions. This paper presents a hierarchical agent-based infrastructure, suitable for the management of large-scale enterprise networks that addresses these issues. The transition to hierarchical agent-based management is achieved through a mid-level manager that being a MA itself, operates at an intermediary level between the manager and the legacy systems and takes full control of managing a given network segment. These entities make the system more adaptive to changing networking conditions, while localising the traffic associated with bandwidth-intensive monitoring applications. A quantitative evaluation, in terms of the overall management cost, confirms that this architecture outperforms both centralised approaches and MA-based 'flat' management models.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1016/S1389-1286(01)00277-8
Computer Networks
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Distributed hierarchical management,Mobile agents,SNMP,Adaptive
Journal
38
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
Computer Networks
17
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.84
20
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Damianos Gavalas197476.93
Dominic Greenwood222419.12
Mohammed Ghanbari31197169.16
Mike O'Mahony4464.97