Network Monitoring Using Intelligent Mobile Agents

Abstract

Network monitoring is a critical issue in today’s rapidly changing network environment. Existing centralized client-server based network management frameworks suffer from problems such as insufficient scalability, interoperability, reliability, and flexibility, as networks become more geographically distributed. This work describes implementation of the agent-based system for network components and services monitoring. The system is designed in a modular fashion to provide easy and efficient inclusion of diverse monitoring objects. Several types of the intelligent agents are defined to perform efficient monitoring of diverse network components, services and applications using different monitoring protocols. In proposed architecture, we use an ontology for representation of monitoring information to provide semantics for building an underlying knowledge base that not only allows agents to communicate, but also to reason with each other, enabling the desired tasks to be performed collaboratively. The system implementation is based on the XJAF (Extensible Java-based Agent Framework) agent framework and the Java EE technology.