Management of heterogeneous ATM networks based on integration of mobile agents with legacy systems

Regardless of the well-known performance and scalability deficiencies, the centralized client-server paradigm based network management architecture, coupled with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for data networks and Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) for telecommunication networks, remains the prevailing solution in the network management arena. The main reason for this are the huge investments that Telcos and the enterprise network connectivity providers have invested. Although significant research and development efforts have been spent in recent years in building alternative solutions, based on distributed management paradigm, their role is still minor. In this paper we propose a third solution, combining the distributed computing benefits based on mobile agents technology with the legacy code of existing client-server based network management systems. We believe that such model provides a cost-effective solution, while permitting significantly to reduce the bottlenecks of client-server based solutions. We demonstrate our solution by applying it to the tasks of PVC configuration management in heterogeneous ATM networks.