A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

DATA DRIVEN INTELLIGENT AGENT NETWORKS FOR ADAPTIVE MONITORING AND CONTROL

To analyze the characteristics and predict the dynamic behaviors of complex systems over time, comprehensive research to enable the development of systems that can intelligently adapt to the evolving conditions and infer new knowledge with algorithms that are not predesigned is crucially needed. This dissertation research studies the integration of the techniques and methodologies resulted from the fields of pattern recognition, intelligent agents, artificial immune systems, and distributed computing platforms, to create technologies that can more accurately describe and control the dynamics of real-world complex systems. The need for such technologies is emerging in manufacturing, transportation, hazard mitigation, weather and climate prediction, homeland security, and emergency response. Motivated by the ability of mobile agents to dynamically incorporate additional computational and control algorithms into executing applications, mobile agent technology is employed in this research for the adaptive sensing and monitoring in a wireless sensor network. Mobile agents are software components that can travel from one computing platform to another in a network and carry programs and data states that are needed for performing the assigned tasks. To support the generation, migration, communication, and management of mobile monitoring agents, an embeddable mobile agent system (Mobile-C) is integrated with sensor nodes. Mobile monitoring agents visit distributed sensor nodes, read real-time sensor data, and perform anomaly detection using the equipped pattern recognition algorithms. The optimal control of agents is achieved by mimicking the adaptive immune response and the application of multi-objective optimization algorithms. The mobile agent approach provides potential to reduce the communication load and energy consumption in monitoring networks. The major research work of this dissertation project includes: (1) studying effective feature extraction methods for time series measurement data; (2) investigating the impact of the feature extraction methods and dissimilarity measures on the performance of pattern recognition; (3) researching the effects of environmental factors on the performance of pattern recognition; (4) integrating an embeddable mobile agent system with wireless sensor nodes; (5) optimizing agent generation and distribution using artificial immune system concept and multi-objective algorithms; (6) applying mobile agent technology and pattern recognition algorithms for adaptive structural health monitoring and driving cycle pattern recognition; (7) developing a web-based monitoring network to enable the visualization and analysis of real-time sensor data remotely. Techniques and algorithms developed in this dissertation project will contribute to research advances in networked distributed systems operating under changing environments

A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

Management system requirements for wireless systems beyond 3G

This paper presents a comprehensive description of various management system requirements for systems beyond 3G, which have been identified as a result of the Software Based Systems activities within the Mobile VCE Core 2 program. Specific requirements for systems beyond 3G are discussed and potential technologies to address them proposed. The analysis has been carried out from network, service and security viewpoints

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users

The purpose of AmbieSense is to provide personalised, context-sensitive information to the mobile user. It is about augmenting digital information to physical objects, rooms, and areas. The aim is to provide relevant information to the right user and situation. Digital content is distributed from the surroundings and onto your mobile phone. An ambient information environment is provided by a combination of context tag technology, a software platform to manage and deliver the information, and personal computing devices to which the information is served. This paper describes how the AmbieSense reference architecture has been defined and used in order to deliver information to the mobile citizen at the right time, place and situation. Information is provided via specialist content providers. The application area addresses the information needs of travellers and tourists

An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications