A survey of network fault management

The communication and sharing of information is a fundamental need to computer users. The number of users who have needed to communicate with others has rapidly increased. Over the last decade, the network domains have become very complex structures. Hence, many faults may occur, which cause them to operate outside their required quality of service. The use of management techniques is required to handle the complexity of computer networks in order to detect and control the behaviour of system resources. Currently, the management systems run on a central station (client-server), where data needs to be transferred from the client to the server and vice versa. This may lead to inefficiency if the network is very large in scale. The use of Mobile Agents (MA) is a new technology based on mobile code that can migrate from one node to another in order to collect, analyse and make decisions locally or remotely on behalf of a centralized network management station.