This article will lead you into the world of mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes it much easier to design, implement and maintain distributed systems. You will find that mobile agents reduce network traffic and provide an effective means of overcoming network latency. Perhaps most important, through their ability to operate asynchronously and independently of the process that created them, they help you to construct highly robust and fault-tolerant systems, thereby directly or indirectly benefiting the end user. Read on and let us introduce you to software agents, including mobile as well as stationary agents. We will explain the benefits of mobile agents and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems. This article then concludes with a brief overview of some contemporary mobile agent systems.
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