ISSUES IN TELECOMM NETWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Introduction

Intelligent agents have become fashionable again in the late nineties, not only within the artificial intelligence community and in the popular press but also in traditional computer science communities. Whereas current commercial solutions for distributed processing are mostly centered on the client-server concept, with remote procedure calls as the standard way of interaction, script languages have emerged that explicitly support agent-oriented programming. Especially in telecommunication applications, where the instant provision of new services and the customization of existing services become critical issues, agents will become to an increasing degree an essential aspect in the design of new networks to handle the ever-increasing complexity.

This paper will focus on the “mobility” attribute of intelligent agents and thus uses the term mobile agent to denote an autonomous mobile object to which a user delegates some or all of her decision-making in the respective problem domain, and that is able to move around an electronic network, communicating with other such active objects by means of message passing. First the evolution of TNMS is described followed by the roles of manager and agent. The next section discusses the security issues of the agent-based systems followed by problems and possible attacks in such systems. These sections also discuss the possible solutions offered and the loopholes existing in these techniques leading to a conclusion that it won’t be a wise step to fully open Telecommunications networks for agents at this point.