Combating the bloated state problem in mobile agents based network monitoring applications

As computer networks increase in size, it is critical to provide efficient and scalable network management. Integration of mobile agents (MAs) with simple network management protocol (SNMP) provides a decentralized network management architecture that overcomes the limitations of the legacy SNMP client/server structure. However, as an MA travels through its itinerary, acquiring the network state at each managed node, its size linearly increases node-by-node and it may be unexpectedly bloated. As a result, a bloated MA will have difficulty in migrating from one node to another. We show that the network response time grows exponentially as the MA size increases linearly. In this paper, we propose a new strategy called itinerary partitioning approach (IPA) that exploits cloning capability of MAs to effectively address this bloated state phenomenon. The analytical model shows the effectiveness of our proposed IPA in terms of network response time. We have implemented the IPA in a practical test-bed network and the results seem to be very encouraging.