Comparing the performance of mobile agent systems: a study of benchmarking

In the past few years there has been an enthusiastic interest in mobile agent technology and several platforms have been developed. Some of them have only been used for research purposes while others have been deployed as commercial products. The community is now looking for applications where these platforms can be effectively used. Some comparisons about the functionality of some mobile agent systems have been presented in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no reported study that compares the real performance of the platforms. In this paper, we present the first results of an experimental study that compares the performance of eight Java-based Mobile Agent systems: Aglets, Concordia, Voyager, Odyssey, Jumping Beans, Grasshopper, Swarm and James. This study presents some insights about the performance and the robustness of each platform. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.