Focused Practice

I. Answer the following questions:

1. Why has mobility support for Internet access created significant interest among researchers?

2. What do we expect the pocket-sized mobile handled nodes are going to be equipped with?

3. Have there been ongoing research efforts to support mobility in the current VoIP protocols?

4. How many basic approaches to support mobility are there in VoIP services?

5. Where and how does the first one seek to solve the mobility problem?

6. How many types of mobility should a well defined mobility management frame-work or scheme deal with?

II. Analyse the grammar structures underlined in the above text.

III. Speak on: VoIP service.

Unit 30 Grammar: The Infinitive. The Participle Word List:

1. distributed network management	управление распределительными сетями
2. mobile agents	автономные программы, быстродействующие факторы
3. network monitoring	наблюдение за сетями
4. ramework	рамки работы, структура
5. scalability	расширяемость, масштабность
6. a novel entity	дополнительный объект
7. host= user	пользователь, владелец
8. domain	домен, область
9. traffic	трафик
10. distributed computing field	поле распределительных вычислений

Mobile Software Agents for Decentralised Network and Systems Management

Mobile Agent (MA) technology has been proposed for Network and Systems Management (N&SM) as an answer to the scalability limitations of centralized models and the flexibility problems of static hierarchical frameworks. Nevertheless, much is still to be done to deploy MA-based management frameworks that efficiently cope with the dynamically changing traffic and topological characteristics of modern networks.

Mobile Agents (MAs) defined as autonomous programs with the ability of moving from host to host and acting on behalf of users towards the completion of a given task, attract increasing attention within the distributed computing field.

The scalability problem is more adequately addressed by hierarchical models that have recently started coming into the picture. But even approaches where MAs are organized in hierarchical fashion, lack clearly defined mechanisms for achieving automatic adaptation of the management system to changing network configurations, i.e. mid-level managers do not normally change the location where they execute. These methods should exploit the unique capability of MAs to move from host to host carrying with them their collected data.

Hence, the deployment of a highly adaptive hierarchically structured management model that relies on MAs both for acting as mid-level managers and collecting results seems a rational approach to address these issues and overcome the limitations of statically configured network management (NM) frameworks.

In order to achieve the transition to a hierarchical model, we introduce a novel entity termed the Mobile Distributed Manager (MDM), a management component that operates at an intermediary level between the manager and management agent end points. MDM entities are essentially MAs that undertake the full responsibility of managing a network domain, when certain criteria (determined by the administrator) are satisfied. Upon being assigned to a domain, the MDM migrates to a host residing in that domain and takes over the management of local network elements (NEs) from the central manager.

As a result, the traffic related to the management of that domain is localized, as the MDM is able to dispatch and receive MAs to collect NM data from the local hosts, or even execute centralized management operations on them.