Intelligent agents in network management : a state of the art

Networks will soon be the key stone of all industries. However, the available NMSs are not adapted to the wide spectrum of network installations and configurations. The introduced new technologies, e.g. CORBA, seem to be not sucient to solve the problems of complexity, cost and scalability. Different studies are on the way to distribute the intelligence to the different network components as a logical answer to these issues. Among them, the Intelligent Agent paradigm seems to be the most promising solution. This paper after a short reminder on the NMS issues and an introduction to the IA concepts- presents a synthesis on the current research on the IA for NM. First, it discusses the management by delegation paradigm. Afterwards, it handles the different ways mobile agents are suggested for NM frameworks. The remainder of the state of the art addresses Intelligent Based NM approaches according to the agent architecture and to cooperation aspects. Finally, the paper presents the perspectives and the potential benefits of IAs in NM.