Development of Low Cost Message Delivery Path for Mobile Agent Communication

The location management ability of a mobile agent system which enables a mobile agent to interact with others accurately by message passing beyond doubts stands important for the mobile agent system. At present, the location management of mobile agent consists of tracking phase and message delivery phase, both of which dutifully create or incur plenty of update messages and interaction messages separately in order to guarantee the effectiveness of mobile agent location management scheme. However, the transmission of messages not only affects the overall performance of mobile agent location management scheme, but also causes the network overhead. Previous studies have devoted to achieve a balance of the trade-off between the costs in tracking phase and message delivery phase in designing a mobile agent location management scheme. This paper argues that the interaction messages in message delivery phase produce the major overhead of overall performance. Therefore, it focuses on investigating how to reduce the performance overhead in message delivery phase and proposes an intelligent update algorithm, the I-Update, for this purpose. Simulation results show that keeping the length of a channel as short as possible leads to the optimum of overall performance.