BUILDING REUSABLE MOBILE AGENTS

摘要

Existing mobile agent-based applications often assume that their mobile agents to be designed to work in particular networks to raise the efficiency of agent migration among multiple nodes, and thus such agents cannot be reused in different networks. To solve a trade-off problem between performance and reusability, this paper proposes a framework for building an application-specific mobile agent from two kinds of components, a itinerary part and a behavioral logic part. The former can be optimized for its target network and can efficiently navigate other mobile agents among nodes in the network. The latter consists of application-specific tasks performed at each node independently of any network. A prototype implementation of this framework and its application were built on a Java-based mobile agent system.