Design issues in mobile agent programming systems

Abstract

We describe the mobile agent paradigm which is becoming increasingly popular for network-centric programming, and compare it with earlier paradigms for distributed computing from which it has evolved. The design of mobile agent systems requires the resolution of several system-level issues, such as the provision of code mobility, object naming, portability, scalability, and a range of security issues that go hand-in-hand with mobile code. Agent programming requires suitable languages and programming models that can support code mobility, and runtime systems that provide some fundamental primitives for the creation, migration and management of agents. We discuss these requirements and describe several mobile agent systems that illustrate di erent approaches taken by designers to address the problems.

A Systematic Review of Fault Tolerance in Mobile Agents

“…Mobile agents are encapsulated pieces of executing program that have the ability to travel from one host to another and perform certain task autonomously [3]. It is a technology that aimed at shifting computation towards the data other than the other way round [1].…”

“…Due to their nature, mobile agent's reliability and execution is not failure-free in the environments they operate. The growth of distributed heterogeneous environments such as the Internet naturally exposes them to abnormal conditions originating from migration request failure, communication exceptions or security violation [3], [4], [6]. Hence, providing reliability is of the essence to integrate agent-driven systems into today's industrial applications.…”

Security in Large-Scale Open Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

“…Ajanta [24] is a mobile-agent system based on the Java programming language. Security and robustness have been primary concerns in Ajanta's development.…”

Content-Based Indexing and Retrieval Supported by Mobile Agent Technology

“…Mobile agents allow the execution of the retrieval tasks in an automated way, with minimal human interaction [2]. This allows the user to concentrate on other client activities, like the preparation of the client's buffer/cache for the expected multimedia delivery.…”