Complimentary polling modes for network performance management employing mobile agents

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 SNMP-based polling both in terms of response time and bandwidth consumption