Token Finding Using Mobile Agents

Abstract

Abstract.One of the greatest challenges facing the software community today is the increasing complexity of software. Complexity limits understanding, making it difficult to evaluate the correctness, reliability, and performance of a system. Coupled with visualization, monitoring can provide users with insight into an application's behavior. Monitoring can also be used in conjunction with automated tools to adaptively tune performance. This paper presents a detailed look at how mobile agents that are embedded in a monitoring system can be used to find a token within a distributed system. Several strategies by which agents may accomplish this task are qualitatively compared. We then describe tests that were performed to evaluate trade-offs among the strategies considered, and discuss the results of those tests.