Development of agent-based system for monitoring software resources in a network environment

Abstract

Mobile agent is becoming an emerging tool for monitoring and managing computer networks. Its usefulness in this regard emanates from its ability to communicate with other agents and devices, and navigate a computer network to collect data and take actions autonomously. In this research, an investigation of the use of an agent-based system to monitor the software tools on the nodes of a computer network is carried out. The proposed framework adopts a multi-agent system approach combining a static server agent with a mobile monitor agent which move around and extract data from each node via the server agent. The system was tested in a computer network environment which is characterized by a Windows NT. The programming and mobility infrastructure is the C\#, an object-oriented and multifunctional programming scheme. The performance of the proposed agent-based system and Remote MONitoring (RMON) system are simulated and the results obtained show the cost of service, query time and delay overhead is lower in the agent-based system than that of RMON.