Reducing Response Time in Network Management Tasks by Using Mobile Agent Strategies

This paper aims to investigate mobile agent tradeoos in network management by performing management task simulations. The mobile agent performs better than the SNMP when the number of managed network elements ranges between two limits: an inferior bound, associated with the number of messages that traverse backbone links, and a superior bound, related to the incremental size of the mobile agent, which turns migration diicult. This paper focuses on the performance analysis of two unload strategies to reduce the response time for the mobile agent: in the rst approach, the mobile agent returns to the management station; in the second one, the mobile agent just sends data to the management station, both after visiting a xed number of nodes. Results show that the response time decreases by 62, and 64%, for the rst and second strategies, when compared with gathering all data without returning or sending these data to management station before nishing the task.