Currently, most network management systems are centralized and therefore, the management systems present severe limitations as far as performance, scalability, and flexibility are concerned. A potential approach to the problem is to equip the management system with MA (mobile agent) capabilities. But it is difficult to identify precisely under which conditions design exploiting mobile agent is preferable over a traditional one. In this paper, a quantitative model is presented to analyze the performance (traffic, response time) of mobile agent design paradigm against the traditional client-server architecture for network management. The mobile agent performance is compared with SNMP (simple network management protocol) one in several simulations. Analysis and simulations results show that the mobile agent performs better than the SNMP when the number of managed network elements exceeds a value related to the overhead of several retrievalsof the SNMP. Moreover, a significant improvement of the mobile agent performance is obtained when the agent returns to the management station, after visiting a fixed number of noeds.