2009 Third International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering
A Distributed Network Management Framework Based on Mobile Agents
FuLiang Guo, Bin Zeng, LiangZhong Cui
Department of Computer
Naval University of Engineering
WuHan, China
e-mail: fuliang_guo@163.com
Abstract—Traditional approaches to network management are
mostly based on the centralized client/server model. Due to the
intrinsic limitations of SNMP-based management paradigms,
such as information bottlenecks and lack of flexibility, have
encouraged a trend towards distributed management system.
The emergence of mobile agent frameworks has led many
researchers to examine their applicability to network
management and control environments. It is believed that
mobile agents can provide better solutions at least to
performance and fault management problems. In this paper,
the fundamental architecture of distributed network
management using mobile agents is presented. We also discuss
its advantages and how to develop mobile agents using
Grasshopper agent platform. Finally, an example of
management application implementation based on our
framework is briefly described.
Keywords-distributed network management; mobile agents;
SNMP; grasshopper agent platform
I. INTRODUCTION
Management applications acquire information about the
network constantly through enquiries to network devices
such as routers, switches, hubs, uninterruptible power
systems, printers, workstations and various servers. When a
problem arises, the application software can notify the
network manager in ‘real time’. Using management
applications such as HP Open View, IBM Net View, and
Cisco Works, network administrators are assisted in their
work. Management activities may include device
monitoring, performance measuring, problem isolation and
resolution, growth planning, and quality-of-service
assurance. Since its development in 1987 and standardization
in 1990, SNMP has been deployed in many companies’ IP-
based intranets, and in the network core [1].
Traditional approaches to network management are
mostly based on the centralized client/server model ，the
Network Management Station (NMS) acts as the client and
the network devices act as servers. A static agent on the
network device acts as a proxy, servicing requests made
upon the Management Information Base (MIB). In the basic
SNMP architecture, the NMS can become a network
bottleneck as a result of the polling-based nature of
monitoring and data collection. This situation can result in an
increased latency of reporting, especially in larger networks.
There are also problems with potentially restricted message
sizes or an overshoot effect. Centralized solutions also have
other disadvantages such as the need for the operator to
978-0-7695-3658-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MUE.2009.90
physically direct data acquisition, unsuitable for large and
complex networks. Thus the modern network management
system must be more powerful, flexible and efficient than
before, and how to design and implement such advanced
network management system is getting important [2].
The emergence of mobile agent frameworks has led
many researchers to examine their applicability to network
management and control environments. It is believed that
mobile agents can provide better solutions at least to
performance and fault management problems, given the
large amount of data that needs to be moved around in
respective solutions based on traditional approaches. The
network bandwidth wasted in the network management
system using mobile agents can be further reduced,
compared to the centralized network management systems.
Moreover, the distributed architecture provides an efficient
way to detect network faults and update the management
policies.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in next
section, we provide a brief overview of mobile agent
technologies. Section 3 presents the design of network
management framework based on mobile agents, and discuss
some major advantages compared to pure SNMP-based
systems. A hybrid network management system combining
mobile agents and SNMP will be proposed. In section 4, we
introduce a popular mobile agent platform-Grasshopper and
describe how to implement our framework based on it.
Finally, we draw our conclusion and talk about our future
works in section 5.
II. OVERVIEW OF MOBILE AGENTS
While stationary agents exist as a single process on one
host computer, mobile agents can pick up and move their
code to a new host where they can resume executing. From
a conceptual standpoint, such mobile agents can also be
regarded as itinerant, dynamic, wandering, roaming, or
migrant [3-4]. The rationale for mobility is the improved
performance that can sometimes be achieved by moving the
agent closer to the services available on the new host.
For example, if an agent wants to obtain information
from several sources on different platforms, it could send
information requests to each of the platforms using the
equivalent of a remote procedure call (RPC). However, if the
volume of information exchanged with the remote site is
large, issues of traffic and bandwidth must be considered.
Also, the agent might be able to process the remote data
more effectively than those services offered at the remote
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site [5]. In either or both of these cases, relocating the agent
to each of the various platforms could be a more efficient
way of processing. One disadvantage of such mobility is that
the remote sites must provide the CPU cycles to support the
mobile agent's processing.
Operating
System
Agent System
Agent System
Agent System
Management
Place Persistence
Registration
AgentAgent
Security
Agent
Migration
Communication Infrastructure
Figure 1. General Architecture of Agent System
Figure 1 is a general system model to support mobile
agent. One host or OS can have one or more agent systems.
The agent system is a platform that can create, interpret,
execute, transfer and terminate mobile agents [6-7]. It is
associated with an authority that identifies the person or
organization for which the agent system acts. It is uniquely
identified by its name and address (e.g. IP address plus Port
number). One agent system can have one or more Places. A
place is an execution environment with a certain context
within an agent system in which an agent can execute. This
context can provide functions such as resource access
control, obtaining local information [8]. The source place
and the destination place can reside on the same agent
system, or on different agent systems that support the same
agent profile.
Many distributed applications fit naturally into the
mobile agent paradigm. Since mobile agents can migrate
sequentially through a set of machines, they and send out a
wave of child agents to visit multiple machines in parallel,
remain stationary, interact with resource remotely. In the past
years, a number of mobile agent systems are developed.
Although these are not directly address the task of network
management, but do help to provide a framework within
which network management systems and applications can be
developed. Among them, the Aglet workbench from IBM,
Odyssey from General Magic, Grasshopper developed by
GMD FOKUS and IKV++, and Voyager from ObjectSpace
are popular [9].
III. DESCRIPTION OF FRAMEWORK
In the context of communication networks, mobile agents
enable the transformation of current networks into remotely
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programmable platforms. The concept of “Remote
Programming” using mobile agents is considered as an
alternative to the traditional “Client/Server programming”
based on the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) or the static
distributed object paradigm (e.g. CORBA, Java-RMI).
Compared to static approaches, mobile agents provide two
major advantages:
z Improved performance: In the case of C/S based
communication, RPC for example, there are typically
several flows between the client and server in order to
perform even a simple transaction. It is expected that
these flows could be reduced to a single mobile agent
with a corresponding reduction in the network traffic.
Another factor is, by migrating to the location of a
needed resource, an agent can interact with the resource
without transmitting any intermediate data across the
network, and this significantly reduces the bandwidth
consumption.
z Flexibility: The strategic advantage of remote
programming is customization. Agents provide
flexibility in extending the functionality offered by
existing communication systems.
This means that mobile agents enable control tasks to be
performed in a real distributed manner. In particular this
concept enables special services to be provided instantly and
to be customized directly at the locations where the
intelligence is needed. An additional key benefit is that
access to local information at a particular network node does
not suffer from varying delays as it is the case with remote
access. This means that that the collected information is
more accurate while fine-grain intervals may be used in
cases of periodic polling.
The fundamental ideas of management based on mobile
agent are depicted below. The management applications are
composed of one or more mobile agent generators. The
generated mobile agent moves or is delivered from manager
station to the managed devices that supporting mobile agent
system. Mobile agent accesses locally the resource of the
managed device and accomplishes the required computation
locally. The achieved results can be reported to the home
manager station, to another manager station, or even to
another mobile agent for further evaluation.
Figure 2. Network Management Framework Based on Mobile Agent
The mobile agent can stay at one place to accomplish
some tasks such as network state monitor, it also can move
further to another place accompanied with the result, which it
has achieved.
As illustrated in Figure 2, our framework consists of four
major components:
1. The Manager, responsible for launching MAS and
displaying returned results.
2. The MA code, capable of migrating between the
managed entities to collect information based on pre-defined
policies.
3. The Mobile Agent Environment, capable of receiving
mobile agents and providing an interface to the local
physical resources. MAE creates an efficient run-time
environment for receiving, instantiating, executing, and
dispatching MA objects, whilst protecting the system against
external attack.
4. The Mobile Agent Generator, a factory that generates
service-oriented MA objects. The MAG is essentially a
process for constructing customized mobile agents in
response to service requirements. Such mobile agents may
dynamically extend NMS functionality, post MAE
initialization, to accomplish management tasks tailored to the
needs of a changing network environment.
The integration of mobile agents with SNMP has been
considered in our approach. The advantage of such a hybrid
system is that it is backwards compatible with existing
SNMP management applications. The structure of the
ameliorated hybrid approach that combines mobile agents
and SNMP in network management is illustrated in the
Figure 3.
Figure 3. Hybrid network management system combining mobile agents
and SNMP
As shown in Figure 3, every MA-supported network
device has to offer a MA context server. The MAs hosted in
the context communicate with the local SNMP agent via
SNMP, just like conventional SNMP-based management
applications. A network can be managed by mobile agents
based management stations as well as stations that rely on
SNMP. The management application creates MAs that it
then dispatches into the network to perform their task
autonomously. Each agent has a specific task and an itinerary.
The itinerary is a list of network devices, and mobile agents
can travel sequentially to many sites according to it. The
agent performs tasks at each network element and eventually
sends results to the management application.
IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTION
This section presents a prototype implementation of our
framework. Since its inception in 1990s, mobile agent has
attracted enormous attention from industry and institutes,
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which leads to a long list of mobile agent platforms
developed, either for academic usage or commercial
purposes. Among these, Grasshopper is most popular and is
adopted for developing our MA based network management
system.
A. Mobile Agent Platform – Grasshopper
Grasshopper, which has been developed by GMD
FOKUS and IKV++ GmbH, is a mobile agent platform that
is built on top of a distributed processing environment. In
this way, an integration of the traditional client/server
paradigm and mobile agent technology can be achieved.
Grasshopper is developed compliant to the first mobile
agent standard of the Object Management Group (OMG), i.e.
the Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility (MASIF).
The MASIF standard has been initiated in order to achieve
interoperability between mobile agent platforms of different
manufacturers [10].
Figure 4. The Grasshopper Distributed Agent Environment
In principle, Grasshopper realizes a Distributed Agent
Environment (DAE). The DAE is composed of regions,
places, agencies and different types of agents. A place
provides a logical grouping of functionality inside of an
agency. The region concept facilitates the management of the
distributed components (agencies, places, and agents) in the
Grasshopper environment. Agencies as well as their places
can be associated with a specific region by registering them
within the accompanying region registry. All agents that are
currently hosted by those agencies will also be automatically
registered by the region registry. If an agent moves to
another location, the corresponding registry information is
automatically updated. Figure 4 depicts an abstract view of
these entities.
Two types of agents are distinguished in Grasshopper:
mobile agents and stationary agents. The actual runtime
environment for both mobile and stationary agents is an
agency; on each host at least one agency has to run to
support the execution of agents. A Grasshopper agency
consists of two parts: the core agency and one or more
places. Core Agencies represent the minimal functionality
required by an agency in order to support the execution of mibOps.setLoadFromCompiledMibs(true);
agents. if (values[MIBS] != null) try {
System.err.println("Loading MIBs:
B. Case Study: Mobile Agent Based Performance "+values[MIBS]);
Management mibOps.loadMibModules(values[MIBS]);
Performance management is one of the five management } catch (Exception ex) {
functional areas identified initially in OSI Systems System.err.println("Error loading MIBs: "+ex);
Management. It supports the collection of performance }
information periodically in order to provide statistics and // Build Get request PDU
allow for capacity planning activities. Performance SnmpPDU pdu = new SnmpPDU();
management needs access to a large quantity of dynamic pdu.setCommand( api.GET_REQ_MSG );
network information. An important issue is to provide this // add OIDs
for (int i=1;i<opt.remArgs.length;i++) {
information to management applications with a small impact
SnmpOID oid = new SnmpOID(opt.remArgs[i]);
on the managed network. Performance management system if (oid.toValue() == null)
based on mobile agents can minimize the response time and System.err.println("Invalid OID argument: " +
bandwidth consumption compared to SNMP-based systems. opt.remArgs[i]);
Following, we will describe step by step how to develop else pdu.addNull(oid);
performance mobile agent using Grasshopper platform. }
(i). Creating a new basic agent pdu = session.syncSend(pdu); // Send PDU and
An agency provides the method createAgent(...) that is receive response PDU
offered by the interface IagentSystem and that has to be if (pdu == null) {
used for creating agents via the API. An example is given System.out.println("Request timed out to: " +
below. opt.remArgs[0] ); // timeout
createAgent("edu.whu.nms.performance.SimpleMa","file System.exit(1);
:/e:/nms/ma","performance",createArgs); }
(ii). Encapsulating the properties related to SNMP System.out.println("Response PDU received from "
Optionally, a set of properties can be provided to an +pdu.getAddress()+", community: " + pdu.getCommunity());
agent, either during the agent’s creation, or during its // print and exit
runtime. In our approach, these properties maybe include }
destination set, MIB object set, performance parameter set, (iv). Starting-up the Region Registry
arithmetic set and so on. Via setProperty method, we can set In order to activate a Region Registry that runs on
the value of one single property, specified by the property default profile and port, we can apply the following
key. command as shown below within a command-line shell.
setProperty("device1-IP","202.114.66.223"); Grasshopper r -n MARegistry
setProperty("read-community","whu-read"); (v). Launching the Agency
setProperty("write-community","whu-write"); If user wants that the agency is automatically registered
setProperty("snmp-port","161"); to the Region Registry, then the following command have to
setProperty("place- be used:
address","socket://202.114.66.223:7002/liroot/place"); Grasshopper a -r socket://<ip>:7020/MARegistry
setProperty("ifOutOctets"," .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.16"); //The (vi). Registering the agent
total number of octets transmitted out of the interface In order to migrate, an agent has to provide information
(iii). Collecting local performance data about the desired destination location. The agent specifies
The method live() is the most fundamental method of this information in terms of a Grasshopper address, which is
each Grasshopper agent, since its implementation realizes an instance of the class GrasshopperAddress. The
the agent’s active, autonomous behavior. Note that this is IRegionRegistration interface is explicitly associated with
the only method that must be overridden by an agent Grasshopper region registries.
programmer when implementing an agent class. For GrasshopperAddress regionAddress = new
instance, we can use following codes to obtain MIB object GrasshopperAddress(registryAddress);
value. (AdventNet SNMP Manager Libraries are used as a //registryAddress is the address of the Region Registry
means of interfacing with SNMP.) IRegionRegistration regionAgent =
public void live() { (IRegionRegistration)
SnmpAPI api; // Start SNMP API ProxyGenerator.newInstance(IRegionRegistration.class,
api = new SnmpAPI(); regionAddress.generateRegionId(),
api.start(); regionAddress);
SnmpSession session = new SnmpSession(api); // (vii). Moving the Agent
Open session Via the move() method, an agent is able to migrate to
session.setPeername(opt.remArgs[0] ); // set remote another agency/place.
Host String nextAddr =getProperty("address" +
//Load MIB file getProperty("nextDestination"));
MibOperations mibOps = new MibOperations(); GrasshopperAddress destAddress = new

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GrasshopperAddress(nextAddr);
move(destAddress);
V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper, we have introduced how to apply the
mobile agent technology in the field of distributed network
management. In our system, mobile agents are created at the
network management level according to user requests and
then migrate to network elements to perform monitoring
functions in a local manner. It is clear that this architecture
meets the demand of the management of the large scaled
networks. Distributing management tasks close to the
managed resources reduces the loads and minimizes
response time. Meanwhile, with the migration ability, the
mobile management applications generated by the manager
can perform specific management tasks autonomously and
purposefully at multiple appropriate managed devices in a
coordinated way.
Finally, we would like to mention the directions of our
future research. We plan to establish a robust security
mechanism in our framework, because the mobile agents will
easily become the targets of attacking in an open distributed
environment. This paper does not discuss any coordination
among multiple mobile agents, but we are interested to
develop a mechanism for assigning a task to one or more
mobile agents. We also intend to research on applying the
framework to an infrastructure for ambient intelligence in
ubiquitous computing environments and to mobile agent-
based managements for sensor networks.
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