Achieving Mobile Agent Systems interoperability through software layering

Interoperability is a key issue for a wider adoption of mobile agent systems (MASs) in heterogeneous and open distributed environments where agents, in order to fulfill their tasks, must interact with non-homogeneous agents and traverse different agent platforms to access remote resources. To date, while several approaches have been proposed to deal with different aspects of MAS interoperability, they all lack the necessary flexibility to provide an adequate degree of interoperability among the currently available MASs. In this paper, we propose an application-level approach grounded in the software layering concept, which enables execution, migration and communication interoperability between Java-based mobile agent systems, thus overcoming major setbacks affecting the other approaches currently proposed for supporting MAS interoperability. In particular, we define a Java-based framework, named JIMAF, which relies on an event-driven, proxy-based mobile agent model and supports interoperable mobile agents which can be easily coded and adapted to existing MASs without any modifications of the MAS infrastructures. Results from the performance evaluation of MAS interoperability was carried by using JIMAF atop Aglets, Ajanta, Grasshopper, and Voyager, demonstrating that the high-level JIMAF approach offers high efficacy while maintaining overhead at acceptable levels for target computing environments. ! 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.