Mobile-Agent-Based Network Fault Management Model And Performance Analysis

Network fault management is one important indicator of measuring network management efficiency and has very important significance to design efficient network management solution. With the booming construction and development of the Internet, network is widely applied in various industries and is more closely linked with our daily production and life. Therefore, the growing of modern network and application of various industries make an increasing complex structure and a higher degree of heterogeneity of network. This puts forward a higher requirement in scalability, reliability and flexibility of modern computer network. However, the traditional SNMP-based Client/Server(C/S) centralized configuration network fault management showed many significant deficiencies in these aspects. Mobile Agents, with integral intelligence, can improve these deficiencies and open a reasonable and effective new direction for network fault management. In future, network fault management solutions combining with mobile agent and the existing SNMP protocol network management technology, not only take advantage of existing network equipment resources to save investment, but also make the network management system update conveniently.The paper firstly analyzes the research state of network fault management and mobile agent, concludes the deficiency of current network fault management system in flexibility, efficiency and performance, and proposes the superiority of mobile agent in network fault management. And then, a general analytical model for SNMP-based Client/Server(C/S) network fault management and mobile agent paradigms is introduced. We express how to build up an analytical framework in detail, which could be used to quantitatively evaluate the performances of network traffic and running time of SNMP-based Client/Server(C/S) and mobile agent paradigms under different scenarios. This paper presents two integrated network fault management models based on SNMP proposal and mobile agent technology which are called MA-C model and MA-Ⅰmodel. We give the basic algorithm of their realization, and analyze their performances. The theoretical and experimental results show that our two models particularly the MA-Ⅰmodel is more efficiency than traditional SNMP-based C/S centralized configuration network fault management paradigm. Our work provides a reasonable analysis and evaluation evidence to establish and implement network fault management scheme based on mobile agent in the future.