Network fault management systems using multiple mobile agents for multihomed networks

For the increasing of the network complexity, it is not easy to exactly determine where the network fault is. Using the characteristic of multihoming, the paper proposes a scheme to identify the network faults, where six types of mobile agents are developed to cooperate to provide fault management functions. Moreover, the characteristics of mobility, intelligence and flexibility help the proposed scheme to identify the faults quickly. Besides, the proposed scheme is implemented on National Broadband Experimental Network (NBEN) and Taiwan Research Network (TANet2), where the two interconnected networks have their own routing policies, but are managed by the common mobile-agent-based network management network. Experimental results show that the ping-monitoring agent implemented in the proposed network fault management system has a 59.66% reduction in the time of monitoring the whole NBEN network.