Abstract: For the purpose of solving the defects of the traditional mobile-agent-based SNMP network management system, such as low system efficiency,long system response time, poor collaborative performance and poor extendibility of agent, a novel hierarchical framework for the network management system based on multi-agent collaboration is designed. This framework contains four levels: the top level for the manager station, the multi-mobile-agent collaboration level, the multi-SNMP-agent collaboration level and the network element level. For the second level, a strategy model which consists of two parts: the middle-tier strategy based on the mobile agent and the multi-mobile-agent collaboration strategy is proposed, which applys the SNMP agent for the stationary agent, implements the collection of the managed datas parallelly and intelligently by using a certain number of mobile agents. A collaboration mechanism among master-agent and sub-agent based on the SNMP protocol for the third level is also realized, which aims at improving the limitations of the AgentX protocol.This mechanism establishes an SNMP agent task model, divides the SNMP agent into the master-agent and sub-agent and makes them adopt the SNMP protocol to collaborate together. Simulation demonstrates that the framework can decrease the bandwidth occupation about 26.9％ compared with the traditional SNMP network management model based on the mobile agent and AgentX protocol, and that the response time is decreased by 29.5％. It is more appropriate for the framework to be applied in large and complicated distributed network environment.

Key words: multi-Agent collaboration, hierarchical systems, multi Agent systems, network protocols, mobile Agent