Distributed Mobile Autonomous Agents in Network Management

摘要

The use of intelligent agents for network management has increased in last years, as an alternative to client/server-based approaches, which exhibit centralization problems. However, there is not yet an effective evaluation of the impact of some agent-based architecture properties, such as mobility, autonomy and distribution. In order to illustrate the discussion on these properties, we present a concrete case study where different agent-based architectures are applied to the problem of disk space management in distributed systems. The architectures are evaluated according to different criteria, such as processing time, network traffic, memory consumption, and human manager workload. We make quantitative and qualitative comparisons of the studied architectures, presenting potential advantages and disadvantages of each one.