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Building and Selecting Mobile Agents for Network Management

  • Management of Active and Programmable Networks
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This paper presents a framework for reusable mobile agents for network management in the sense that they are independent of either particular networks or applications. The framework enables a mobile agent to be composed from two layered components, which are mobile agents. The former is a carrier of the latter over particular networks independent of any management tasks and the latter defines management tasks performed at each host independently of any networks. The framework also offers a mechanism for matchmaking the two components. Since the mechanism is formulated on a process algebra approach, it can accurately select the appropriate itinerary component to perform management tasks at hosts that the tasks want to visit over networks. The framework provides a methodology for easily developing and operating mobile agents for traveling among multiple sub-networks to perform their management tasks at all of the nodes that they visit. This paper also describes the framework, its prototype implementation, and a practical application.

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Notes

  1. In process algebras, & is an operator for specifying parallel executions. The operational semantics of the language is an interleaving model in the literature of process algebras and each agent migration is an atomic action.

  2. Details of the MobileSpaces mobile agent system can be found in our previous paper [5].

  3. The current implementation of the system uses the Java object serialization package provided by JDK to marshal and unmarshal agents. The package does not support the capturing of stack frames or program counters for threads. Consequently, our system cannot serialize the execution states of any thread objects.

  4. The environment was small in scale because it is implemented as a testbed for developing middleware and applications for Grid or cluster computing rather than as a computational infrastructure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-8430, Japan

    Ichiro Satoh

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  1. Ichiro Satoh
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Correspondence to Ichiro Satoh.

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Ichiro Satoh received his B.E., M.E, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Keio University, Japan in 1996. From 1996 to 1997, he was a research associate in the Department of Information Sciences, Ochanomizu University, Japan and from 1998 to 2000 was an associate professor in the same department. Since 2001, he has been an associate professor in National Institute of Informatics, Japan.

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Satoh, I. Building and Selecting Mobile Agents for Network Management. J Netw Syst Manage 14, 147–169 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-005-9018-1

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