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...

This paper presents a performance evaluation of the mobile agent paradigm in comparison to the client/server paradigm. This evaluation has been conducted on top of the Java environment, using respectively RMI, the Aglets mobile agents platform and a mobile agents prototype that we implemented. The measurements give the cost of the basic mechanisms involved in the implementation of a mobile agen...

This paper aims to investigate the use of mobile agents for service provision in mobile computing environments. A quantitative model and experimental measurements are performed to compare Java RMI and mobile agents in the special context of software downloading. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained using mobile agents. In addition, two agent-based services,...

Although mobile agents and their supporting infrastructures have been extensively developed, it is still an emerging technology. A wider acceptance of mobile agents would be facilitated with the exploitation of suitable methodologies and tools which fully support their development lifecycle. This paper proposes a Statecharts-based development process for mobile agents, which allows for a seamle...

Intelligent mobile agents are sent between routers to carry out a set of required tasks. Mobile agents can carry algorithms and information to various routers that they visit, such as: timer, navigation algorithm, network information, stability of the network, and load traffic of the network. By clustering intelligent mobile agents, it is possible to minimize the cost of time for each agent to ...

A major setback for mobile agent technology is a lack of interoperability between systems for mobile agents which prevents them from reaching “critical mass.” In this paper, we analyze the requirements for interoperability, and present design patterns which support interoperability between systems for mobile agents. We tested our patterns by adding support for Jade agents as well as for Tracy a...

Mobile agents are a new paradigm for communication and cooperation in distributed computing. To combine the new paradigm with the promising World Wide Web platfrom, we integrated mobile agents into Web Servers. In this way, mobile agents may travel from Web server to Web server to access their local data. The paper describes how we integrated mobile agents support into a Web server. We present ...

Viruses, bots, worms, etc. are nothing else but mobile agents. Mobile agents in turn have been the scope of research in computer sciences for quite some years. Recently research on the security side of mobile agents has received increased attention, too. Perfectly securing mobile agents is generally impossible. While this is cumbersome for legitimate scenarios this is good news when trying to p...

Mobile Agent is a type of software system which acts “intelligently” on one’s behalf with the feature of autonomy, learning ability and most importantly mobility. Now mobile agents are gaining interest in the research community. In this article mobile agents will be addressed as tools for mobile computing. Mobile agents have been used in applications ranging from network management to informati...

An approach for building application-specific protocols for migrating mobile agents over a network is presented. The approach has two key ideas. One is to introduce mobile agents as first-class objects. The other is to build and deploy network protocols for agent migration as mobile agents, which allows network protocols for agent migration to be naturally implemented within mobile agents and t...