| This paper focus on the network management problem of intelligent optical network and an architecture based on mobile agent is proposed; and aim to be the basis of putting the mobile agent in business.Currently, management technology of optical network is mainly based on simple network management protocol (SNMP), which may be result in problems when the network gets bigger and bigger, because it is a technology which based on polling to monitor the network, so the workload of the network management system (NMS) would be very heavy as the network grows, at last the response time of the NMS would be slow or even crashed; it would also lead to proliferation of network traffic which may cause congestion of the network; the cost will be much when new requirement of network management functionality is added. As a result, traditionally SNMP based network management architecture can only fit the network which is small and do not have the requirement of upgrade.The distributed network management framework may be a good solution for such a problem, and mobile agent is just one of its outstanding representations. Through the effort of mobile agent, it will be more effective to collect information from a distributed network which is hierarchical and dynamical. Briefly, mobile agent can solve the disadvantage of SNMP based centralized management problem of scalability and flexibility. This paper proved that the mobile agent based network management system can reduce the traffic of intelligent optical network and the response time according to the simulation. Mobile agent based network management have been proposed for a long time, which then attracted much interest in the research community as well as the industry, and there are much study on this topic, also the security problem of mobile agent which limited the development have been solved, that's mean the application of it in practice maybe not far away. But nearly all the study is computer network based rather than optical network, while this paper focus on the management of intelligent optical network management by mobile agent, particularly automatically switched optical network (ASON), through study the feature of it, then associate both the control plane of ASON and mobile agent, a new management architecture proposed. Because SNMP has been the factual standard of network management, it can be well supported in a hierarchical network composed of various types of devices of different vendors. So our architecture should fully utilize the functionality of the SNMP agent that already on the device, and associate the mobile agent with it. |
