Programmable agents for flexible QoS management in IP networks

Network programmability seems to be a promising solution to network management and quality of service (QoS) control. Software mobile-agents technology is boosting the evolution toward application-level control of network functionalities. Code may be deployed in the network dynamically and on demand for the benefit of applications or application classes. Agents support a dynamic distribution of control and management functions across networks, thus increasing flexibility and efficiency. We propose to use mobile-agent technology to overcome some of the problems inherent in current Internet technology. We focus our attention to QoS monitoring, being locally significant in network subdomains, and realize a QoS management strategy in response to variations of user, customer of application requirements, and of the network state. We describe our experience and the results obtained from our testbed, where software agents are instantiated, executed, migrated, and suspended in order to implement flexible QoS management in IP networks.