Network Management based on Mobile Agents using Programmable Tuple Spaces

Today networks are rapidly increasing both in size and in complexity, and their management requires new paradigms and new tools. In fact, centralised approaches suffer of several limits with regard to flexibility and scalability. Even traditional distributed solutions do not completely solve the problems. Instead, mobile agents can be exploited to realise a fully distributed, scalable and flexible network management model. In this context, an appropriate coordination model is required to develop effective network management applications. This paper proposes the MARS coordination architecture, based on programmable Linda-like tuple spaces. Tuples can be exploited both to access network resources and to let agents interact. Moreover, the programmability of the tuple spaces increases flexibility and permits the definition of application specific policies to rule the accesses of mobile agents to local network resources and services. This paper shows, by mean of several examples, how MARS can be employed to support network management.