A new approach based on mobile agents to network fault detection

As networks become larger and more complex, the need for advanced fault management capabilities becomes critical. Faults are unavoidable in large and complex communication networks, but quick detection and identification can significantly improve network reliability. Packet monitoring has become a standard technique in network fault detection, but when applied to a large-scale network yields a high volume of packets. To overcome this problem, some techniques are proposed. However the proposed techniques are based on popular SNMP agent, RMON technology, which are characterized by centralization, they do not provide strong scalability and local processing ability. In this paper we present an intelligent mobile agent-based approach to deal with the problem of network fault detection and implemented it by using java technology and aglet which is a mobile agent system from IBM. Experiment results show the proposed approach is very effective in network fault detection.