Distributed service management using mobile components: Architectures, multimedia services and agent technologies

Creation and management of value added services on top of the basic network services is inherently challenging due to: (1) diverse networking and computing platforms onto which different service characteristics must be mapped and realized, (2) diverse policies for services and management, (3) distributed environments across variety of domains, (4) real-time changes on the network conditions that affect the service. This thesis studies the service and network management requirements of value-added services and proposes a new component-based architecture, utilizing distributed object and agent technologies in order to address these requirements. The architecture consists of management systems, network elements, end systems, agent servers, event collection and correlation servers, and security servers, all connected through a common middleware platform.; Generic models for these architectural components have been developed and utilized in order to derive specific agents and components, including detailed views of QoS, connection, security and mobile agent services and interfaces, as well as their management. QoS-driven service provisioning has been demonstrated, using stationary and mobile agents, by working on a unified information model and on standard SNMP MM objects to satisfy the QoS requirements of user applications.; Using the existing object-oriented methodologies such as the UML and Fusion, an enhanced development methodology has been proposed to accommodate the proposed component-based architecture. In order to study the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a prototype, that creates and tests mobile service components and their servers, has been implemented.