Network management application-oriented taxonomy of mobile code

Abstract

We present an application-oriented taxonomy of mobile code. We use a novel approach to managing telecommunication networks as a vehicle for describing the concepts through demonstrating the use of several types of mobile code in innovative network and system management applications. To make a clear distinction between the types of mobile code, we use a terminology that follows the Java conventions originated with the term applet. Therefore, in our jargon, we have servlets, exflets, deglets and netlets. We point to a piglet as a type of mobile code that constitutes a security risk to the network. We deliberately avoided the term agent in our taxonomy. In this paper, this term is used to refer to a general concept of code autonomy. Our approach to managing networks addresses the issues in traditional client/server, or in this context manager/agent, network management systems like the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, problems inherent to heterogeneous environment, like interoperability issues, problems with maintainability of the software, etc. With the techniques based on mobile code, we can harness many interoperability issues and work toward plug-and-play networks (PnPnets) by applying mobile agents that can take care of many aspects of configuring and maintaining networks in an autonomous way.