Using mobile agents for network performance management

Mobile agent frameworks have attracted a lot of attention in recent years, seen as counterparts of static distributed object frameworks but allowing also for object or agent mobility. A lot of research is currently being carried out trying to assess their applicability to network management and control environments. In this paper, we present our experiences of using a mobile agent framework to design and realize a performance management system which exhibits "constrained mobility", constrained in the sense that performance monitoring agents are sent to execute within network elements and stay there until their task is accomplished. We present the architecture, design and implementation of such a system, compare and contrast it to static object approaches and present a detailed performance comparison to a similar Java-RMI based implementation, trying to assess the overhead of mobile agent solutions.