Distributed Network Management with Secured Mobile Agent Support

Mohammed Ibrahim

Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Taiz University, Yemen

 Abstract: Network computing is changing rapidly these days. The mobile agent technology invented to overcome the complexity resulting due to the increasing size of network components that rises new network management schemes. Many prototype applications providing mobile agent capability have been proposed for being used in network management. E-commerce and information retrieval are some of them. The motive behind the agent mobility is that, it addresses some limitations faced by traditional centralized client-server architecture, which are mainly, minimizing bandwidth consumption, supporting network load balancing, enhancing scalability as well as flexibility, increase fault-tolerance and solve problems caused by unreliable network connections. However, despite its benefits, mobile agent systems still pose security threats.  In this paper, we propose a mobile agent architecture that supports flexible and reliable interaction of autonomous components in a distributive network environment. We present a management scheme in a hierarchical level that provides to a user with a reliable and flexible global access to internet/network information services. We further describe a protection mechanism to both agents and their hosting sites of execution called agent servers. 

Keywords: Mobile agent, domain manager, manager of managers, agent server, agent transfer protocol.