A Topology-Adapted Network Defense Model Based on Mobile Agent

Summary form only given. We have discussed a mobile multi-agent based framework to address the aspect of topology discovery in ad hoc wireless network environment. In other words, we have designed a multi-agent based protocol to make the nodes in the network topology aware. Our primary aim is to collect all topology-related information from each node in the network and distribute them periodically (as updates) to other nodes through mobile agents. The notion of stigmergic communication has been used through the implementation of a shared information cache in each node. Moreover, we have used a concept of link stability and information aging based on which a predictive algorithm running on each node can predict the current network topology based on the current network information stored at that node. We have demonstrated through performance evaluation of a simulated system that the use of mobile multi-agent framework would be able to make each node in the network topology aware without consuming large portion of network capacity. This would eventually help us to implement a proactive routing protocol without much overhead. Moreover, as a direct outcome of infiltrating topology information into the nodes, the foundations for designing distributed network management and implementing communication awareness get automatically laid.

No doubt, the usages of mobile agent and mobile phone technologies are rapidly increased. The mobile agent has a promising room in the industry area. Unfortunately, this technology faces some security problems from mobile agents and hosts sides. Two of the fundamental issues in designing protocols for message passing between mobile agents (MAs) are tracking the migration of the target agent and forwarding messages to it. Even with an ideal fault-free network-transport mechanism, messages can be dropped during MA migration. Therefore, in order to provide reliable message delivery, protocols need to overcome message loss caused by asynchronous operations of agent migration and message forwarding. As mobile devices and third generation mobile networks have become a reality, location based services are thought to be a major growing area. Mobile devices are given context sensitiveness so that they can be aware of the users/services surrounding physical environment and state. In this paper we propose message forwarding approaches, namely push and pull, are explored to design adaptive and reliable message delivery protocols.Also location aware services scheme by using an agency, which helps in discovering the required services for the mobile users. The agency consists of five agents: Manager Agent (MA), Route Monitoring Agent (RMA), Local Service Management Agent (LSMA), Global Service Management Agent (GSMA) and Area Monitoring Agent (AMA).

Nowadays, a lot of e-Learning systems are widely deployed in educational schools. Typical e-Learning systems are implemented as client-server model. In the client-server model, the number of clients affects on the load of the server. In order to reduce the load on the server, we developed a P2P-based distributed e-Learning system. The proposed system consists of a lot of mobile agents which manage study contents and some functions such as scoring, showing questions, and correct answers. When a learner requests content, a mobile agent who has its content comes to the learner's computer, and then he/she can start the study. Here, a mobile agent has to manage multimedia data, which may be a huge size of data. Thus, a mobile agent has to migrates to the learner's node with a huge size of data. Then, the learner cannot start the study until the mobile agent finished to migrate. In order to solve this problem, we divide multimedia data into fragments and prepare mobile agents which manages each fragments. Since each mobile agents become small, a learner can start the study soon without waiting for the migration of a mobile agent which has a huge size of multimedia data. We, however, have to search a mobile agent which manages their fragments. Therefore, a mobile agent which manages n-th fragments informs its location to the agent which manages (n+1)-th fragments, and vice versa. Since each agent knows the location of a mobile agent which manages next and previous fragment, and fragments are cached into learner's node, a learner can play multimedia data smoothly without finding the location of mobile agent which manages holding next fragment. Experiment results show the effectiveness of our method.

In this paper, we consider an e-Commerce system that supports buying and selling goods or services over the Internet using Mobile Agent(MA) technologies. MAs are active, autonomous, and self-replicable software objects containing both computational logic and state information. When MA technologies are applied to e-Commerce environments, the MAs can search for a product on behalf of the buyer. The buyer constructs a group of MAs, and dispatches each agent in the group to the supplier sites. Each buyer agent compares price information of goods which are suggested by the suppliers. Eventually, all MAs exchange their price information cooperating to determine the most suitable item. In the selection process, if the price information which is exchanged among the MAs is modified by malicious entities, the user may not select intended goods. In this paper, we propose a group session key generation scheme called PGKA(Partial Group session Key Agreement) for secure communication among the MAs. The PGKA has no sponsors, controllers, or any other members charged with special duties. The main idea in PGKA is to distribute the computation of the group session key generation among the members, which makes the scheme suitable for fully distributed environments. In addition, the cost of the key reconstruction is very low in this scheme, because only the seed value is required to be transmitted for the reconstruction process.

This article presents an approach for inter-agent communication and inter-platform agent migration based on IEEE FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) Agent Communication Language (ACL) messages. The promising features of IEEE FIPA standards that support open, flexible, and interoperable agent communication and migration are discussed in the paper. Messages for agent communication and migration, platform architecture that deliver and manage these messages, and the main procedure of processing a mobile agent message are also introduced. An application example, in which a mobile agent visits multiple hosts and travels via mobile agent messages, simulates a mobile agent for remote data processing. This example shows the feasibility, simplicity, and openness of the presented approach for mobile agent migration. Using FIPA ACL messages for agent migration in FIPA compliant agent systems simplifies agent platform, reduces development effort, and easily achieves inter-platform migration through well-designed communication mechanisms provided in the agent platform.

Wireless networks and the usage of mobile devices are becoming popular in recent days, especially in creating ad-hoc networks. There is thus scope for developing mobile systems, where devices take an active part of creating a network infrastructure, and can actually be used to route data between networks. This research proposes to assess different models of the usage of static and mobile agents to determine the best route through ad-hoc networks. The determination of this route is a complex one, and requires research into the best metrics to identify the best path, such as memory capacity, network performance, processing capabilities, cost, and so on. One model is to use a mixture of mobile and static agents to gather relevant information. These agents could perform important tests, which could be used to generate the best route through a network. This research looks at different models for the deployment of these agents, which balance the usage of static and mobile agents. These are appraised in the terms of performance, reconfigurability, and ease of installation.

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and their application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work has produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products. However, despite the positive results, we feel that mobile agent technology is still not ready to enter the path of mainstream software development. In our perspective, one of the main reasons for this situation arises from the traditional approach to mobile agent technology. This approach, based on the familiar concept of the mobile-agent distributed platform as an extension of the operating system, focuses too much on the mobile agents and associated issues (mobility, agent lifecycle, security, coordination, etc.) and provides poor support for the development of applications where mobile agents are just one of several available technologies. Learning from past experience, we are now working on a new approach where the focus is brought back to the applications and mobile agents become just one the tools available to develop distributed systems. This provides a much lighter framework for application-based mobile agent systems. This paper presents the lessons learned from our previous project and discusses the new concept we are developing: application-centric mobile agent systems.

Network Topology Discovery is crucial to a number of network management tasks. Traditional topology discovery techniques require internal nodes to take actions on measurement packets, which makes them unpractical in many cases. For these reasons, tomographic techniques have been introduced, which allow for the reconstruction of network topologies with no need for cooperation from internal routers. The usual approach to tomographic topology discovery is based on clustering nodes into tree structures according to soft similarity metrics. We recently proposed a novel technique based on decision theoretic considerations that help the topology reconstruction by limiting the set of hypotheses to a finite and well-defined set, thus determining hard metrics. In the scheme, probe traffic is sent to all couples of end-nodes and a metric is assigned to each measurement. In this paper, we extend the technique by ordering the topology reconstruction procedure according to metrics reliability defined in terms of their variances. The algorithms presented in the paper are validated through extensive simulations in several network scenarios. The results show that such a methodology allows to retrieve a complete picture of the network that includes the detection of all the internal nodes along with the values of capacities of the interconnecting links.

Underwater acoustic networks are widely used in survey missions and environmental monitoring. When an underwater acoustic network (UAN) is deployed in a marine region or two UANs merge, each node hardly knows the entire network and may not have a unique node ID. Therefore, a network topology discovery protocol that can complete node discovery, link discovery, and node ID assignment are necessary and important. Considering the limited node energy and long propagation delay in UANs, it is challenging to obtain the network topology with reduced overheads and a short delay in this initial network state. In this paper, an efficient topology discovery protocol (ETDP) is proposed to achieve adaptive node ID assignment and topology discovery simultaneously. To avoiding packet collision in this initial network state, ETDP controls the transmission of topology discovery (TD) packets, based on a local timer, and divides the network into different layers to make nodes transmit TD packets orderly. Exploiting the received TD packets, each node could obtain the network topology and assign its node ID independently. Simulation results show that ETDP completes network topology discovery for all nodes in the network with significantly reduced energy consumption and short delay; meanwhile, it assigns the shortest unique IDs to all nodes with reduced overheads.

There are many areas in which mobile agent technology can be deployed. Researchers are now looking at this technology as a solution in their respective research areas, such as information retrieval, distributed computing, and network management. This increase of interest is due the basic characteristics of mobileagents - autonomous and mobile. In the paper, we are exploiting the abovementioned characteristics of mobile agents, and applying this technology in Internetenvironments. Using a mobile agent as a transparent content transcoding proxy in a proxy based network architecture, we show how a mobile proxy agent can be used to improve quality of service provided to the end user connected via heterogeneous access networks, using computing devices which have very different capabilities.

Mobile agent technology has been proposed for use on the Internet. The mobile agent is a software program that acts on behalf of a user or software. It has the following features: (1) it is autonomous; (2) it has one or more objectives; (3) it has a scope of competence; and (4) it may, or may not, collaborate and communicate with other software and users. 3 In order to perform its job, it is able to migrate from a source host to a target host on a network under its own control. 4 However, this may lead to a great deal of security threats and attacks. When a mobile agent moves between a series of hosts, it may happen to encounter either trust-worthy or malicious hosts. A mobile agent must be capable of authenticating legal hosts and other agents to avoid malicious attacks. Ideally, a mobile agent should be versatile, robust, and secure in changing environments. Therefore, the security issue when dealing with mobile agents becomes essential. So far, the research on mobile agent security has been focused on the following topics: 5

Now a days mobile agents are commonly used in e-commerce applications. Mobile agent is an independent program that moves around the network to execute the predefined tasks on behalf of user. Stock market can utilize mobile agents for brokering services especially for advisory dealing. Here mobile agent helps the client to make a decision on which share has to bought. Security is the major concern when mobile agents are used. Mobile agents must be protected when it travels from one host to another host. When mobile agent technology is adopted a major type of security issue encountered is colluded truncation attack. The proposed method helps to avoid this type of attack by constructing a routing table. Routing table constructed with trust and reputation value identifies the secure route for migration and cryptographic algorithms are used to protect the gathered information. The cryptographic algorithms achieve security goals like confidentiality and integrity.

Solutions for system and network management given today are afflicted with two main shortcomings, namely the centralised approach they are based on and the inadequate addressing of heterogeneous environments. While the latter is the main concern of, for example, Web-based management activities, the aspect of centralisation is not being covered to full extend. With regard to the explosive growth of computer systems and networks both in size and complexity, new approaches therefore have to be evaluated which address all problems caused by complexity and heterogeneity. Mobile agent technology is being discussed as a promising new technology for various application areas, with management being one of the most promising. In this paper, problems arising when trying to apply this new technology to system and network management are identified and discussed. The focus is on how to handle the overall complexity with mobile agents, which are limited in size, knowledge, and functionality. An architecture is presented which introduces various types of mobile agents. By determining the required correlation sequence and identifying the co-operation of agents, it is shown how an alarm correlation with mobile agents can be established, which forms the basis for addressing management tasks with mobile agent technology.

In today's world mobile agents and mobile ad- hoc networks are the two technologies that are contributing towards better connectivity and communicability. When the two technologies used jointly, the interest is increased. Due to the properties like self- configuration and infrastructure-less, the mobile ad-hoc networks provide various remarkable features. But the various challenges are also associated with mobile ad-hoc networks like dynamic topology, mobility, energy constraint etc. Mobile agent provides solution to these challenges. A mobile agent is a new way of computer interactions and provides better options for the developers to create applications based on connectivity. Mobile agents move around the ad-hoc networks in a different and better way than the other widespread client server architecture based applications. Due to their mobility and autonomy these agents can perform various functions in mobile ad-hoc networks like topology discovery, routing, key management, congestion control etc. The paper reviews the role of the mobile agents in the mobile ad-hoc networks, and emphasizes its application on the various layers of a layered architecture of mobile ad-hoc networks and concludes its merits as compared to other conventional approaches.

The security problem of mobile agent is important for applications using mobile agent technology. In this paper, we analyzed the security problems of mobile agent system exposed in opening environment and proposed a method to improve the authentication and credentials management in mobile agent environment. In our design, the trusted computing platform is used as the basic platform to running mobile agent systems, and the trusted platform module will used to help the authentication and credentials management. We also gave a model system for building trusted mobile agent system. In this system, the security of mobile agent is improved by using trusted computing platform which is linked with upper layer applications through the trusted software stack. Then, trusted services for mobile agent, including authentication, credential management and key storage, are supported.