A framework for management and control of distributed applications using agents and IP-multicast

As more and more applications on the Internet become network aware the need and possibility to remotely control them becomes larger. This paper presents a framework for control and management of distributed applications and components. This is done using IP-multicast and an agent based application architecture. The target of the framework is to allow for resource discovery of both controllable elements and available control points in the these elements as well as real-time control. All this is done in scalable and secure way based on IP-multicast and asymmetric cryptography. The presented framework is also independent of the underlying transport mechanism to allow for flexibility and easy deployment. The framework bandwidth usage and introduced control delay is presented. Details on the reference implementation of the framework and example usage scenarios where the framework is used to create bandwidth adaptive applications and better group awareness is also presented