Software agents in network management

The globalisation of Internet technology had a strong impact on technology price and availability, which resulted in the emerging of more opportunities and more services in distance learning, electronic commerce, multimedia and many others. From the user perspective, there is a need for more comprehensive interfaces. From the network perspective, the introduction of QoS and the upcoming of new and more complex services led to additional bandwidth and management requirements. The amount of management information produced by applications, workstations, servers and all kind of network components is increasingly hard to process. All this information can be filtered by an intelligent network management system, capable of proactive management. This paper intents to highlight the role of newer paradigms, such as Software Agents, in Network Management frameworks. The use of intelligent programs that substitutes the user in boring, repetitive or information intensive tasks can help in the resolution of problems such as congestion, reliability, real-time response and many others

A new mechanism for distributed managers persistence

SNMP is currently a worldwide used network management framework. However, it only describes the structure of management information and how to access it, i.e., low-level operations, presenting no considerations about information interpretation or other highlevel tasks. Recent work in this area has managed to define several modules suitable for management distribution (DISMAN), which implies building agents that can cope with rather complex information structures. In the case of information loss, for example due to an agent reset, it is not practicable to force the management station to define and configure the information once again. In this paper we present an XML based data model that can provide a structure for distributed managers persistency. Moreover, it can be used to define macros to group together elementary SNMP operations and to describe what should a mobile agent do when meeting some SNMP agent

Managing mobile agents with SNMP

This paper describe a project that integrates SNMP into a mobile agent environment in order to achieve a simple but powerful goal: mobile agents have to manage and being managed through SNMP

Implementação e avaliação de gestão remota sobre DISMAN

Apesar da evolução do SNMP durante a última década e que conduziu recentemente à versão Draft Standard do SNMPv3, várias são as lacunas que continuam a ser apontadas a este modelo. No seio do IETF o Disman WG tem procurar vingar a ideia da utilização de uma arquitectura de gestão distribuída colmatando, assim, uma dos mais graves limitações do SNMP – a escalonabilidade. Neste artigo apresentar-se-á um trabalho exploratório que pretende conduzir a um ambiente de gestão SNMP onde a distribuição de operações de gestão é efectuada através de agentes disman móveis

Integration of service, network and system management: current and forthcoming trends

A major problem that industry is being faced with is related to the miscellaneous of management requirements and to the explosion of management information. Network and systems management often make use of different tools and technologies. The introduction of Quality of Service in the Internet will bring increased needs for efficient service management approaches in the network. The integration of these different kinds of management approaches into a common framework is critical for the future development of the Internet and intranets. This paper exploits the usage of software agents acting as mediators between different management protocols and data and assuring transparent integration of those dissimilar solutions

On the use of mobility in distributed network management

Information Technology has been under unprecedented transformations and it is dramatically changing the way of work inside organizations. Information management systems must be adequate to cope with the profound effects of this evolution, which expectations includes the introduction into the networks of enormous quantities of different elements. Mobile agent paradigm seems to be, for many researchers, the right solution to deal with the pressures of these new demands. This paper discuss the issues around mobility of code on network management environments and presents ongoing work that provides mobility capability to distributed managers upon recent work of IETF’s Disman working group

Distributed management based on mobile agents

During the forthcoming years, Internet-based concepts will continue to revolutionize, in an unpredictable way, the mode enterprises provide, maintain and use traditional information technology. Management systems will be a crucial issue in the struggle with this crescent complexity. However, new requirements have to be considered, due to the expectation of enormous quantities of different elements, ranging from an impressive network bandwidth availability to multimedia QoS-constrained services. Many researchers believe that mobile agent paradigm can provide effective solutions on these new scenarios. This paper presents an implementation of management applications supported upon distribution and delegation concepts. For that it uses the current work of IETF’s Disman working group enhanced with mobility provision. The mobility allows the distributed managers to adapt dynamically to a mutable environment optimizing the use of network resources

A decentralized multi-agent based network management system for ICT4D networks

Network management is fundamental for assuring high quality services required by each user for the effective utilization of network resources. In this research, we propose the use of a decentralized, flexible and scalable Multi-Agent based system to monitor and manage rural broadband networks adaptively and efficiently. This mechanism is not novel as it has been used for high-speed, large-scale and distributed networks. This research investigates how software agents could collaborate in the process of managing rural broadband networks and developing an autonomous decentralized network management mechanism. In rural networks, network management is a challenging task because of lack of a reliable power supply, greater geographical distances, topographical barriers, and lack of technical support as well as computer repair facilities. This renders the network monitoring function complex and difficult. Since software agents are goal-driven, this research aims at developing a distributed management system that efficiently diagnoses errors on a given network and autonomously invokes effective changes to the network based on the goals defined on system agents. To make this possible, the Siyakhula Living Lab network was used as the research case study and existing network management system was reviewed and used as the basis for the proposed network management system. The proposed network management system uses JADE framework, Hyperic-Sigar API, Java networking programming and JESS scripting language to implement reasoning software agents. JADE and Java were used to develop the system agents with FIPA specifications. Hyperic-Sigar was used to collect the device information, Jpcap was used for collecting device network information and JESS for developing a rule engine for agents to reason about the device and network state. Even though the system is developed with Siyakhula Living Lab considerations, technically it can be used in any small-medium network because it is adaptable and scalable to various network infrastructure requirements. The proposed system consists of two types of agents, the MasterAgent and the NodeAgent. The MasterAgent resides on the device that has the agent platform and NodeAgent resides on devices connected to the network. The MasterAgent provides the network administrator with graphical and web user interfaces so that they can view network analysis and statistics. The agent platform provides agents with the executing environment and every agent, when started, is added to this platform. This system is platform independent as it has been tested on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. The implemented system has been found to provide a suitable network management function to rural broadband networks that is: scalable in that more node agents can be added to the system to accommodate more devices in the network; autonomous in the ability to reason and execute actions based on the defined rules; fault-tolerant through being designed as a decentralized platform thereby reducing the Single Point of Failure (SPOF) in the system

Multi-agent-based DDoS detection on big data systems

The Hadoop framework has become the most deployed platform for processing Big Data. Despite its advantages, Hadoop s infrastructure is still deployed within the secured network perimeter because the framework lacks adequate inherent security mechanisms against various security threats. However, this approach is not sufficient for providing adequate security layer against attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service. Furthermore, current work to secure Hadoop s infrastructure against DDoS attacks is unable to provide a distributed node-level detection mechanism. This thesis presents a software agent-based framework that allows distributed, real-time intelligent monitoring and detection of DDoS attack at Hadoop s node-level. The agent s cognitive system is ingrained with cumulative sum statistical technique to analyse network utilisation and average server load and detect attacks from these measurements. The framework is a multi-agent architecture with transducer agents that interface with each Hadoop node to provide real-time detection mechanism. Moreover, the agents contextualise their beliefs by training themselves with the contextual information of each node and monitor the activities of the node to differentiate between normal and anomalous behaviours. In the experiments, the framework was exposed to TCP SYN and UDP flooding attacks during a legitimate MapReduce job on the Hadoop testbed. The experimental results were evaluated regarding performance metrics such as false-positive ratio, false-negative ratio and response time to attack. The results show that UDP and TCP SYN flooding attacks can be detected and confirmed on multiple nodes in nineteen seconds with 5.56% false-positive ration, 7.70% false-negative ratio and 91.5% success rate of detection. The results represent an improvement compare to the state-of the-ar