Research And Implementation Of Network Measurement Device Agent Based On Middleware

Network measurement tools are becoming more and more with the development ofnetwork measurement technique. For some large-scale network measurement systems,different devices need to be controlled in the specific network environments. However,the communication protocols adapted by different device manufacturers are not thesame. Thus the research on network measurement device agent is of great importance inorder to make the controlling operation of different devices uniform.The paper mainly studies the controlling operation and communication protocol ofmeasurement devices based on the “Research and Implementation of Instrument AgentSoftware” sub-project of one of the research institutes of China Electronics TechnologyGroup, of which measurement devices includes Network Simulator and BusinessGeneration System. An agent software design is proposed. And the corresponding agentsoftwares are implemented for Network Simulator and Business Generation Systemrespectively.First, the function requirements of agent software are analyzed according to therequirements of network measurement system. And the structure for agent software isdesigned, which deploys different agents to different network nodes to make the systemeasy to extend. Then the parameter structure for the test task is designed, which usesXML to store the parameters. The parameters correspond to the parameter table in thedatabase, so that it is intuitive and easy to lookup. Since the structure is quite clear, it iseasy for parameter analyzing as well as test result report generation.Then, a communication protocol based on short TCP connection is designed for thecommunication between agent software and control center. Also, a reliable transportprotocol based on UDP is designed for the communication between Network Simulatorand Business Generation System, which ensures the reliability and consistency of thetransport process through mechanisms including timeout retransmission,acknowledgement, sequence number and heartbeat. For the controlling operation ofdevices, a common interface based on middleware is proposed. The interface isimplemented through DLL, which separates agent software from specific devices toachieve good scalability, so that agent software can control the devices in a uniform waywithout considering the specific device type. Finally, the agent softwares for Network Simulator and Business GenerationSystem are implemented and tested based on the research above. Test results show thatthe agent has complete function and stable performance, and is able to control networkdevices. At present, the agent software is being applied to a large-scale network system.