Role of Agents in Distributed Network Management: A Review

Today’s network management systems, mostly based on SNMP or CMIP management protocols, suffer from scalability and flexibility problems as it involve the transmission of large amount of management data towards the centralized management station for processing. In the event of network stress (e.g. generation of lots of fault data or performance monitoring data) it overloads the management station. A distributed paradigm is a viable solution to perform management functions when network start growing significantly. In this sense, use of mobile agents offer many possibilities for designing the next generation of distributed network management systems. They decentralize processing and control thereby reducing the management traffic around the management station and distribute processing load. This paper discusses and analyzes the key advantages and application of mobile agents in the distributed network management systems.