Automated Management of IP Networks through Policy and Mobile Agents

Abstract

With the magnificent expansion of network, both in the types of network elements and the software components to manage them, driven by the increasing requirement of different services, it is getting more imperative to seek a means to deploy the network management tasks and services in a fast, ubiquitous and automated way. Mobile agent technology (MAT) provides a promising means to achieve this goal with more flexibility and automation of managing network than those traditional client/server based distributed methods, such as CORBA. Mobile agents, as an enabling technology, can easily represent one of the roles involved in the network management; therefore have great potential to be widely used in network management. This paper proposes to use Policy-based Network Management (PBNM) as an application for MAT to facilitate network management products' development. PBNM, as a newly introduced but widely welcomed technology in the Internet world, can take over the overall management of hybrid network whereas MAT enables the flexible implementation of PBNM system. On the other hand, the agents usually have intelligence, which can be well guided by established policies from PBNM, which makes MAT and PBNM perfectly matched to each other. The work presented in this paper has been developed in the framework of the Europe Union (EU) sponsored IST Project MANTRIP. A commercially oriented test-bed, which is fully based on mobile agent technology, has been set up, and a scenario for solving a practical network management challenge, i.e., inter-domain IP Virtual Private Network, is implemented on this test-bed, which predicts a very promising commercial use of mobile agent in real world. Moreover, the policy-based network management system presented in this paper also covers some of the network management issues under investigation in the EU IST CONTEXT project. This policy and MAT based network management system intends to provide a ubiquitous network management system regardless of the underlying network resources, either wired network elements as the main scope of MANTRIP project or wireless network elements as the main stream of CONTEXT project.