An Architecture for Real-Time Mobile Agent Systems

Intelligent Mobile Agents were initially envisioned as software entities that could roam the Internet acting on behalf of their creator. However, recently the mobile agent architecture has proven to be a useful development model for distributed computing. This paper will explore several real-time distributed computing applications that can benefit from mobile agents. To fully exploit the mobile agent architecture in a real time system the software solution must have deterministic time constraints. Several approaches to implementing deterministic timing within mobile agents are explored in this paper. Finally, the paper will outline future research that must be completed before real-time mobile agents can become a reality.