Performance analysis of mobile agents

The results of a performance analysis of mobile agents in a distributed network environment are presented. Analytical models are developed and used to compare the performance of carrying out a simple management function with mobile agents (MA) or SNMP (simple network management protocol). An examination is made of how delay is affected by the size of the management domain and how each method behaves in both a local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) environment. For large domains, optimal performance is obtained if the mobile agents´ size is bounded, and this may require sharing the management task among a small number of mobile agents