Evaluation of Constrained Mobility for Programmability in Network Management Christos Bohoris, Antonio Liotta, George Pavlou Center for Communication Systems Research School of Electronic Engineering and Information Technology University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, UK {C.Bohoris, A.Liotta, G.Pavlou}@eim.surrey.ac.uk Abstract. In recent years, a significant amount of research work has addressed the use of code mobility in network management. In this paper, we introduce first three aspects of code mobility and argue that constrained mobility offers a natural and easy approach to network management programmability. While mo- bile agent platforms can support constrained mobility in a rather heavyweight fashion, optimized approaches such as our CodeShell platform presented here can provide performance and scalability comparable to those of static distrib- uted object platforms such as Java-RMI and CORBA. Properly implemented constrained mobility is thus of great importance in network management, result- ing in flexible, extensible, programmable systems without prohibitive perform- ance overheads. Keywords. Code Mobility, Mobile Agents, Java-RMI, CORBA, Performance Evaluation 1 Introduction and Background Network management has been the subject of intense research over the last decade, with the relevant progress being twofold: on the one hand, approaches and algorithms for solving management problems have been devised; and on the other hand, different management technologies have been proposed and standardized. From the protocol- based approaches of the early 90’s, exemplified by the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [1] and OSI Systems Management (OSI-SM) [2], the focus moved to distributed object-based approaches in the mid to late 90’s, exemplified by the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [3] and more recently by Java’s Remote Method Invocation (Java-RMI). The paradigm of moving management logic close to the data it requires is a tech- nique that has been conceived early in the evolution of management architectures, the relevant framework known as “management by delegation” [4]. Subsequent research showed the applicability of this concept in the context of OSI-SM [5] with a similar approach subsequently standardized, the Command Sequencer Systems Management Function (SMF). More recently, the same concept has been proposed in the context of