Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agents for E-commerce Applications

Abstract

Abstract. Mobile agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for the design and implementation of distributed applications. While mobile agents have generated considerable excitement in the research community, they have not translated into a significant number of real-world applications. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of work that quantitatively evaluates ( i) the effectiveness of one mobile agent framework over another, and (ii) the effectiveness of mobile agents versus traditional approaches. This paper contributes towards such an evaluation. We identify the underlying mobility patterns of e-commerce applications and discuss possible client-server (CS) and mobile agent (MA) based implementation strategies for each of these patterns. We have compared the performance of three mobile agent frameworks, viz., Aglets, Concordia and Voyager, for their suitability for an e-commerce application development. We have performed experiments to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of CS versus MA strategies, for the identified mobility patterns. We used Java sockets for the CS implementation and the ObjectSpace VoyagerTM (Voyager) framework for the MA implementation. In this paper, we present our observations and discuss their implications.

Analysis on the performance of mobile agents for query retrieval

“…However, our proposed query retrieval approach is different compared with the previous approaches [15][16][17]19,20,23,18] object cloning, dispatching, and disposing. This is done by combining a hierarchical and a parallel dispatching of mobile agents to the LP servers in order to retrieve the query results which has been applied in the EHQR approach as described in Section 4.6.…”

“…We try to minimize the number of agents used to fetch the query results from the remote hosts in order to reduce network overload. It is different compared with the previous approaches [15][16][17][18][19][20]23,24,[26][27][28] by utilizing the mobile agent properties such as object cloning, dispatching, and disposing in the EHQR approach. This is done by combining a hierarchical and a parallel dispatching of mobile agents to the local prefetch servers in order to retrieve the query results in the MaSS.…”

“…Jha et al [19] have analyzed the quantitative comparisons between mobile agent and client-server approach. However, the mobility patterns of mobile agents are only based on the simple approaches such as a sequential client-server approach, a sequential mobile agent approach, a parallel client-server approach and a parallel mobile agent approach.…”

Intelligent Agent based Mobile Shopper

“…It does not accept inputs from the user. Also it has been noted that adoption of Agent technology in real world applications is very slow though it has many advantages such as reduced network load, overcoming network latency etc., [16][17][18]. Also it has been shown that mobile Agent technology is a better alternative to Client/server architecture [17].…”

Advanced mobile agent security models for code integrity and malicious availability check

“…With the concept of mobile agent, the execution process will go to the place where the data are available, data will not send to the place of execution process. For this process mobility, different types (Jha and Iyer, 2001) of mobile agents are developed with different standards and procedures. The different type of agents are: Single hop mobile agent (will visit only one remote host and get back to home), Multihop mobile agent with Static Itinerary and Static Order (will visit multiple remote host and return to the owner with the required result.…”