Mobile Agents for Locating Documents in Ad Hoc Networks

The wide availability of mobile devices equipped with wireless communication capabilities together with the technical possibility to form adhoc networks paves the way for building highly dynamic communities of mobile users. An interesting application in such an environment is decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing and exchanging. Locating the required files in a highly dynamic network while minimizing the consumption of scarce resources such as bandwidth and energy is the main challenge in this domain. Since the availability of files will change significantly over time, an asynchronous approach to the search seems promising. In this paper, we show why standard peer-to-peer file exchange protocols cannot be used under these circumstances and introduce our approach based on the use of mobile agents for propagating the search requests. We highlight the main components of the system and discuss the agent life cycle in detail together with the parameters and strategies governing the migration of agents, their cloning, mutation, and termination.