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Abstract.With the magnificent expansion of network, both in the types of network elements and the software components to manage them, driven by the increasing requirement of different services, it is getting more imperative to seek a means to deploy the network management tasks and services in a fast, ubiquitous and automated way. Mobile agent technology (MAT) provides a promising means to achieve this goal with more flexibility and automation of managing network than those traditional client/server based distributed methods, such as CORBA. Mobile agents, as an enabling technology, can easily represent one of the roles involved in the network management; therefore have great potential to be widely used in network management. This paper proposes to use Policy-based Network Management (PBNM) as an application for MAT to facilitate network management products' development. PBNM, as a newly introduced but widely welcomed technology in the Internet world, can take over the overall management of hybrid network whereas MAT enables the flexible implementation of PBNM system. On the other hand, the agents usually have intelligence, which can be well guided by established policies from PBNM, which makes MAT and PBNM perfectly matched to each other. The work presented in this paper has been developed in the framework of the Europe Union (EU) sponsored IST Project MANTRIP. A commercially oriented testbed, which is fully based on mobile agent technology, has been set up, and a scenario for solving a practical network management challenge, i.e., interdomain IP Virtual Private Network, is implemented on this test-bed, which predicts a very promising commercial use of mobile agent in real world. Moreover, the policy-based network management system presented in this paper also covers some of the network management issues under investigation in the EU IST CONTEXT project. This policy and MAT based network management system intends to provide a ubiquitous network management system regardless of the underlying network resources, either wired network elements as the main scope of MANTRIP project or wireless network elements as the main stream of CONTEXT project.

We present t he design and implementation of a working system that enables self-configuration and self-optimization in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) by exploiting context awareness and cross-layer design principles, combined with simple network management policies and network programmability. We propose the collaborative management of the MANET through a proactively constructed body of nodes in order to overcome the inherently dynamic nature of MANETs.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are characterized by their heterogeneity and the diverse capabilities of the nodes forming the network. Almost any device equipped with a wireless network interface can join an ad hoc network. In such an environment it is difficult to deploy common services without a common understanding among the participating nodes and their capabilities, in terms of processing power, battery life, expected residence time and also in terms of already installed and operational software. This paper presents a middleware-based programmable infrastructure that allows the nodes of a mobile ad hoc network to download and activate required protocol and service software dynamically. This enables the alignment of the nodes' capabilities so that common services and protocols are used among heterogeneous ad hoc network nodes. We first present the middleware functionality and architecture and then evaluate it through both testbed experimentation and simulation. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach and architecture perform relatively well, with overall convergence time growing linearly with the number of nodes and without any adverse effects because of increasing node density.

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