ATM network discovery using mobile agents

Abstract

With the proliferation of new networking technologies, and the demand for new services, it will become increasingly difficult, and nearly impossible, to manage large-scale networks without an intelligent, automated management system. Discovering and keeping track of the topology of a network is essential for effective network management. We introduce a distributed algorithm for discovering the connectivity graph of an ATM network using intelligent mobile agents. In the proposed scheme links are discovered in a distributed fashion, thereby making this approach significantly more scaleable than applications using the traditional client/server model and SNMP.