Papers by Dominic Greenwood
… , 1999. ICC'99. 1999 …, Jan 1, 1999
The use of Mobile Agent technology to distribute and delegate management tasks promises to overco... more The use of Mobile Agent technology to distribute and delegate management tasks promises to overcome the scalability and flexibility limitations of the centralised Network Management paradigm. An efficient, lightweight infrastructure based on Mobile Agents is described, which addresses these issues by distributing management operations amongst managed devices and hence reducing processing load and bandwidth usage. A Mobile Agent Generator that facilitates the creation of new mobile agents for additional services is also presented. Our infrastructure is shown to outperform SNMP both in terms of polling response time and bandwidth consumption when considering data intensive operations.
Computer Networks, Jan 1, 2002
Several distributed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, have be... more Several distributed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, have been recently proposed to answer the scalability limitations of centralised models and the flexibility problems of static hierarchical frameworks. Yet, although agent-based management frameworks have recently started evolving from the early 'flat' models to hierarchical structures, they cannot efficiently cope with the dynamically changing traffic and topological characteristics of modern networks. This is mainly due to the limited use of agent mobility (employed either through mid-level manager entities or between static mid-level managers and managed devices) and lack of appropriate policies enabling automatic calibration of the management system based on network conditions. This paper presents a hierarchical agent-based infrastructure, suitable for the management of large-scale enterprise networks that addresses these issues. The transition to hierarchical agent-based management is achieved through a mid-level manager that being a MA itself, operates at an intermediary level between the manager and the legacy systems and takes full control of managing a given network segment. These entities make the system more adaptive to changing networking conditions, while localising the traffic associated with bandwidth-intensive monitoring applications. A quantitative evaluation, in terms of the overall management cost, confirms that this architecture outperforms both centralised approaches and MA-based 'flat' management models. Ó
Intelligent Agents for …, Jan 1, 1999
The intrinsic limitations of traditional centralised Network Management (NM), such as information... more The intrinsic limitations of traditional centralised Network Management (NM), such as information bottlenecks and lack of flexibility, have encouraged a trend towards distributed management intelligence. Although several distributed NM architectures, exploiting the advantages of Mobile Agents (MA) have been recently proposed, when considering Network Performance Management (NPM) they fail to address scalability problems. In this paper, we describe a secure and fault-tolerant management framework based on MAs, which addresses these limitations by introducing two efficient, lightweight polling modes. Both real-time and off-line NM data acquisition is considered. An in-depth performance analysis of the introduced polling modes, in a data-intensive NPM application is also undertaken. The two modes are shown to outperform SNMP-based polling both in terms of response time and bandwidth consumption.
Global …, Jan 1, 2000
This paper introduces the concept of dynamic hierarchical management, enabled by Mobile Agent (MA... more This paper introduces the concept of dynamic hierarchical management, enabled by Mobile Agent (MA) technology. The proposed framework addresses the scalability limitations of the centralised paradigm and the poor flexibility of static hierarchical management architectures to changing networking conditions. The increased adaptability of our framework is enabled by a novel management entity, termed Mobile Distributed Manager (MDM). MDMs, being MAs themselves, can dynamically migrate to an assigned network domain (given that certain requirements are met) and undertake its management responsibility, operating at an intermediary level between the central manager and SNMP agents, localising the associated management traffic. The paper also focuses on the design decisions and implementation experiences of the proposed architecture.
iscc, Jan 1, 1999
Distributed network management (NM) architectures exploiting the advantages of mobile agents (MA)... more Distributed network management (NM) architectures exploiting the advantages of mobile agents (MA) promise to relieve some of the limitations intrinsic to client-server based centralised NM, such as lack of scalability, interoperability and flexibility. However, the use of MAs alone could impose an unnecessary transmission overhead if mobile code were to be used for trivial tasks. Hence, an infrastructure based on a hybridisation of centralised and distributed approaches is proposed, which maintains the lightweight nature of centralised NM for trivial management tasks, whilst adopting a distributed MA-based scheme as task complexity and suitability changes. Remote processing and compression of NM data issues are investigated in order to reduce the bandwidth usage. Security enhancements are also considered.
Microprocessors and …, Jan 1, 2001
Mobile Agent (MA) technology has been proposed for Network & Systems Management (N&SM) as an answ... more Mobile Agent (MA) technology has been proposed for Network & Systems Management (N&SM) as an answer to the scalability limitations of centralised models and the flexibility problems of static hierarchical frameworks. Yet, much still need to be done to deploy MA-based management frameworks that efficiently cope with the dynamically changing traffic and topological characteristics of modern networks. This paper starts with an extensive review of the research approaches on MA-based management. Then, we propose a highly adaptive and dynamic hierarchical MAbased framework for N&SM that is based on appropriate policies to enable automatic calibration of the management system depending on network conditions. The applicability of the introduced framework is tested in realistic management scenarios and three applications on network monitoring are proposed.
Active Networks, Jan 1, 1999
Active, mobile processes or agents are a technology whose features promise to have a significant ... more Active, mobile processes or agents are a technology whose features promise to have a significant impact on the distributed management of communications networks. Through the interaction of agents with one another and their device-based environments, active network architectures arise. This paper outlines a modular architecture that exploits these features to create a network-element management framework supporting both agents and conventional SNMP messaging. A process kernel is described which houses both pre-loaded and visiting agent processes, the pre-loaded processes having well defined functions including automated device registration and local fault diagnosis. An operational sequence is discussed, highlighting the beneficial usage of agents for certain automated tasks and an experiment measuring the response time of agents versus centralised SNMP polling is evaluated.
Arxiv preprint arXiv: …, Jan 1, 2010
This paper proposes a framework based completely on Java technology. The advantages brought about... more This paper proposes a framework based completely on Java technology. The advantages brought about by the use of Java in network management answer some critical problems existing in current systems. With this work we address several factors concerning interoperability and security in heterogeneous network environments. Specifically, we present a manager application and a multithreaded agent engine that make use of a lightweight communication mechanism for message exchange. A MIB parser is introduced to accelerate handling of incoming management requests, and the RSA public-key cryptosystem is implemented to provide both encryption and authentication features. Results, measured in terms of response time, compare favourably with other published work and standard management frameworks.
Global …, Jan 1, 1999
Several distributed Network Management (NM) architectures, exploiting the advantages of Mobile Ag... more Several distributed Network Management (NM) architectures, exploiting the advantages of Mobile Agents (MA), have been recently proposed to answer some of the limitations intrinsic to client-server based centralised NM, such as information bottlenecks and lack of flexibility. However, when considering network performance management, they fail to address scalability problems. In this paper, we introduce two efficient, lightweight polling modes based on MAs that address these limitations. Both real-time and off-line NM data acquisition is considered. The introduced modes are shown to outperform SNMPbased polling both in terms of response time and bandwidth consumption.
Intelligent Agent Technology
Mobile Agents (MA) have been proposed as a solution for distributed Network Management (NM). Howe... more Mobile Agents (MA) have been proposed as a solution for distributed Network Management (NM). However, most MA-based infrastructures exhibit scalability limitations when data intensive management applications are considered. Therefore, we present three novel applications, tailored to transfers of bulk network monitoring data, in which MAs are used to perform data aggregation, acquire atomic SNMP table views and support selective retrieval of SNMP table objects that meet specific selection criteria. The proposed applications are supported by a lightweight management framework described in previous work. A quantitative evaluation, in terms of bandwidth usage, shows that these applications surpass SNMP-based polling performance.
Title: Brokering Marketable Network Resources Using Autonomous Agents
Multi Agent Systems by Dominic Greenwood
A Multiagent Web Service Composition Engine, Revisited
The 9th IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology and The 4th IEEE International Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services (CEC-EEE 2007), 2007
ABSTRACT This paper provides an update on our Multiagent Web Service Composition Engine which was... more ABSTRACT This paper provides an update on our Multiagent Web Service Composition Engine which was entered in the first Web Service Composition Challenge at the EEE-05 conference. This paper explores the rational behind the selection of a multiagent architecture for service composition problems and demonstrates the relevance of interaction based computation. Rather than describing the composition algorithm from an AI reasoning perspective, a description of the service composition agents from an interaction perspective is provided.
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Papers by Dominic Greenwood
Multi Agent Systems by Dominic Greenwood