January 1, 2005

Dear Editor of the [journal title]:

Enclosed are three copies of  a paper, entitled "Mobile Agents for Network Management." Please accept it as a candidate for publication in the [journal title]. Below are our responses to your submission requirements: 

1. Title and the central theme of the article.

Paper title: "Mobile Agents for Network Management." This study reviews the concepts of mobile agents and distributed network management system. It proposes a mobile agent-based implementation framework and creates a prototype system to demonstrate the superior performance of a mobile agent-based network over the conventional client-server architecture in a large network environment.

2. Which subject/theme of the Journal the material fits

• New enabling technologies (if no matching subject/theme, enter 'Subject highly related to [subject of journal] but not listed by [journal title])

3. Why the material is important in its field and why the material should be published in [journal title]?

The necessity of having an effective computer network is rapidly growing alongside the implementation of information technology. Finding an appropriate network management system has become increasingly important today's distributed environment. However, the conventional centralized architecture, which routinely requests the status information of local units by the central server, is not sufficient to manage the growing requests. Recently, a new framework that uses mobile agent technology to assist the distributed management has emerged. The mobile agent reduces network traffic, distributes management tasks, and improves operational performance. Given today's bandwidth demand over the Internet, it is important for the [journal title] readers to understand this technology and its benefits. This study gives a real-life example of how to use mobile agents for distributed network management. It is the first in the literature that reports the analysis of network performance based on an operational prototype of mobile agent-based distributed network. We strongly believe the contribution of this study warrants its publication in the [journal title].

4. Names, addresses, and email addresses of four expert referees.

• Prof. Dr. William Gates
  Chair Professor of Information Technology
  321 Johnson Hall
  Premier University Lancaster, NY 00012-6666, USA
  phone: +1-888-888-8888 - fax: +1-888-888-8886 e-mail: wgates@lancaster.edu
  Expertise: published a related paper ("TCP/IP and OSI: Four Strategies for Interconnection") in CACM, 38(3), pp. 188-198.
  Relationship: I met Dr. Gate only once at a conference in 1999. I didn't know him personally.

• Assoc Prof. Dr. John Adams
  Director of Network Research Center
  College of Business Australian University
  123, Harbor Drive Sydney,
  Australia 56789
  phone: +61-8-8888-8888 - fax: +61-8-8888-8886
  e-mail: jadams@au.edu.au
  Expertise: published a related paper ("Creating Mobile Agents") in IEEE TOSE, 18(8), pp. 88-98.
  Relationship: None. I have never met Dr. Adams.

• Assoc Prof. Dr. Chia-Ho Chen
  Chair of MIS Department
  College of Management 
  Open University
  888, Putong Road 
  Keelung, Taiwan 100 
  phone: +886-2-8888-8888  - fax: +886-2-8888-8886
  e-mail: chchen@ou.edu.tw
  Expertise: published a related paper ("Network Management for E-Commerce") in IJ Electronic Business, 1(4), pp. 18-28.
  Relationship: Former professor, dissertation chairman.

• Mr. Frank Young
  Partner, ABC Consulting
  888, Seashore Highway
  Won Kok, Kowloon
  Hong Kong 
  phone: +852-8888-8888  - fax: +852-8888-8886
  e-mail: fyoung@abcc.com
  Expertise: Mr. Young provides consulting services extensively to his clients regarding network management practices.
  Relationship: I have worked with Mr. Young in several consulting projects in the past three years.

Finally, neither the manuscript in its entirety nor portions therein have been published previously nor are under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Sincerely,
 

Johnny Smith, Ph.D.