A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a Java-based mobile agent platform designed specifically for network and systems management, addressing resource efficiency and essential functionality to facilitate broader adoption.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight, flexible MAP tailored for management applications, overcoming limitations of existing platforms in resource consumption and functionality.

Findings

Successfully implemented in Java for management tasks

Addresses resource and functionality limitations of existing MAPs

Facilitates wider adoption of mobile agents in network management

Abstract

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.