Mobile Agent Systems: From Technology To Applications

Acj, 2005

In this paper we present a comprehensive study of mobile agent applications. We classify the application fields as follows: Network monitoring and management, information searching and filtering, multimedia, Internet, intrusion detection, telecommunications, military, and others. We discuss the potential uses of mobile agents in the various fields and present the many systems and architectures that have been proposed and implemented. Furthermore, we describe ongoing efforts to integrate currently implemented technologies with mobile agent technology. For each of the application fields, we list statistics showing the distribution of research output according to certain criteria such as article type and application field. We end each section with a summary of the work done and provide directions for future work. Finally, we conclude with suggestions about promising research areas involving mobile agents.

International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences

Abstract—Mobile Agents are a well-known programming,paradigm nowadays. There is a multitude of research concerning Mobile Agent Systems with emphasize on agent coordination, agent languages and agent migration technology. On the one hand, it is often argued, that Mobile Agents are well-suited for the use in the Internet and especially with Mobile Devices and roaming users. On the other hand, there are only few publications describing the actual implementation of a Mobile Agent System for Mobile Devices. In this paper we present our implementation of the Mobile Agent System Okeanos for the use in mobile environments with emphasize in agent routing and forwarding.

Journal of Systems Architecture, 2000

The recent development of telecommunication networks has contributed to the success of applications such as information retrieval and electronic commerce, as well as all the services that take advantage of communication in distributed systems. In this area, the emerging technology of mobile agents aroused considerable interest. Mobile agents are applications that can move through the network for carrying out a given task on behalf of the user. In this work we present a platform (called MAP (Mobile Agents Platform)) for the development and the management of mobile agents. The language used both for developing the platform and for carrying out the agents is Java. The platform gives the user all the basic tools needed for creating some applications based on the use of agents. It enables us to create, run, suspend, resume, deactivate, reactivate local agents, to stop their execution, to make them communicate each other and migrate.

1999

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

This paper addresses the problem of managing distributed mobile agent infrastructures. First, the weaknesses of current mobile agent implementations will be discussed and identified from the manageability viewpoint. The solutions devised and experimented in order to alleviate these weaknesses in our own agent platform will then be presented. These solutions are generic and could easily be applied to the majority of existing mobile agent implementations. The paper will finish with the discussion of a new approach we are following in the M&M Project, based on a rather different architecture that significantly reduces the manageability requirements.

Journal of Communications, 2008

Mobile Agents is a new paradigm for distributed computing where security is very essential to the acceptance of this paradigm in a large scale distributed environment. In this paper, we propose protection mechanisms for mobile agents. In these mechanisms, the authentication of mobile agents and the access control to the system resources are controlled by the mobile-agents platform. Each agent defines its own access control policy with regard to other agents using an Interface Definition Language (IDL), thus enforcing modularity and easing programming task. An evaluation of these mechanisms has been conducted. The measurements give the overhead involved by the proposed protection mechanisms to the performance of mobile agents. An important advantage of our protection mechanisms are transparency to agents and the portability of nonsecure applications onto a secure environment. A mobile agent system and the protection mechanisms have been implemented. Our experiments have shown the feasibility and the advantages of our mechanisms.

New technologies are required to face new scenarios due to the fast spread of the Internet. The paper surveys the current trends of the emerging mobile agent technology. In a high-connected world, agents are the active entities, which roam across network nodes on behalf of their senders. We show some applications that can take advantages from the mobile agent approach. The paper presents the relevant aspects of coordination and security, which are currently discussed in the mobile agent community, pointing out open research directions.

2006

This paper presents the solution adopted by the AgentService platform in implementing a software infrastructure for mobile agents. The mobility service takes advantage of the agent model provided by the platform which offers the separation between the state of the agent and its activities. The modular architecture of the platform allows an elegant integration of the mobility service whose implementation resides within an additional platform module. The mobility infrastructure offers its services to the agents that can be stopped, moved, and restarted in a transparent manner. AgentService provides a sort of weak mobility service: during a transfer the state of the agent is maintained while the activities it performs are started from the beginning. The mobility infrastructure is a component that enriches the platform features and allows the implementation of more complex services such as load balancing strategies among different AgentService installations.

There exist distributed scenarios in which the need for dynamism, mobility, and adaptivity, has to be addressed with highly dynamical approaches. These scenarios present different challenges and difficulties: efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed data sources, dynamic load balancing, unstable connections and communication failures, etc. So, different approaches and middleware have appeared to tackle these challenges and help the developer of distributed applications. In particular, mobile agent technology can provide significant advantages for the development of applications in these contexts. In this paper, we emphasize the benefits that mobile agents can provide to distributed systems by illustrating them with real distributed systems that we have developed in our research group. Mobile agents play a key role in all the scenarios presented: 1) They are able to track the relevant data and computers involved in a certain computation, 2) they move the processing tasks whe...