Mobile agent messaging models (original) (raw)
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Communication and tracking infrastructure of a mobile agent system
Proceedings of the Thirty-First Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Objects are reactive in the sense that they change state only when one of their methods is invoked by other objects. Reactive objects are sufficient in a client-server model of computation with a remote invocation mechanism " a la RPC". However, active objects are much more powerful mainly because they are autonomous entities. Epidaure's objects are a particular type of active objects from which multi-agent systems can be built. In the context of mobility, migration becomes a necessity. For instance, a mobile client may disconnect from its server and reconnect to another server at a later time. In this paper, we describe in a detailed manner the communication mechanism of a particular multi-agent system, Epidaure, and how the communication algorithm and mobility protocols that we developed can be applied to address problems related to mobile objects (e.g., registration, transport, tracking,. . .).
Mobile agents can benefit from standards efforts on interagent communication
1998
Abstract On the road to the future success of mobile agents, we believe that interagent communication is an issue that has not been adequately addressed by the mobile agents community. Supplementing mobile agents with the ability to interact with other mobile or static agents, or agentified information sources is a necessity in the vastly heterogeneous arena in which mobile agents are called to compete.
Towards the use of mobile agent based message systems
… , 2004. WET ICE 2004. 13th IEEE …, 2004
Communication is the base mechanism for coordination and collaboration in human activities, and it plays a fundamental role in enterprise environments. However current communication systems are not based on the message content, but they focus on the message transport and delivery. Furthermore the presence of several communication protocols and tools leads to a heterogeneity in communications, which can lead to difficulties in activity coordination. This paper presents an approach for communications based on the use of mobile agents, which can realize content-filtering, and can unify several message systems in a single one, leaving the user free from system details and able to interact with more than one message system at the same time.
Mailbox-based scheme for mobile agent communications
IEEE Computer, 2002
In various situations, mobile agents at different hosts must cooperate with one another by sharing information and making decisions collectively. To ensure effective interagent communication, communication protocols must track target agent locations and deliver messages reliably. Researchers have proposed a wide range of schemes for agent tracking and reliable message delivery. However, each scheme has its own assumptions, design goals, and methodology. As a result, no uniform or structured methods exist for characterizing current protocols, making it difficult to evaluate their relative effectiveness and performance. The authors propose a mailbox-based scheme for designing mobile agent communication protocols. This scheme assigns each agent a mailbox to buffer messages, but decouples the agent and mailbox to let them reside at different hosts and migrate separately.
Enhancing Mobile Agent Communication Performance
International Journal of Computers and Applications, 2005
The recent evolution of distributed systems has favoured the development of a new generation of mobile agents based applications. In fact, many agent systems have been created in the last few years, and there are currently various efforts to standardize them. However, some problems are still under research, including mechanisms for agent security, control structures, transactional support, and design of communication models. Previous research [1] has shown that better communication performance model can be achieved by mixing remote procedure calls with agent migration. In this article we propose an algorithm to provide the agent with a path with minimal communication cost for some special network topologies.
Architectural guidelines for Mobile Agent Systems
In , Lange claims that lack of a programming model for agent-based applications prevents wider mobile agent deployment, while Johansen argues that it is easy for a systems programmer to build and deploy a mobile agent, but that novice users need a better way to create agents. Kendall et al reason that agent development to date has been done independently, leading to problems such as could assist in a more wide-spread use of mobile agents. The purpose of this literature survey is to gain a knowledge base of the current practices in programming mobile agents in order to formulate such a set of guidelines for creating/programming and using a mobile agent efficiently.
MAP: Design and implementation of a mobile agents' platform
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.
A Reliable Message Delivery Protocol for Mobile Agents
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000
The abstractions and protocol mechanisms that form the basis for inter-agent communications can significantly impact the overall design and effectiveness of Mobile Agent systems. We present the design and performance analysis of a reliable communication mechanism for Mobile Agent systems. Our protocols are presented in the context of a Mobile Agent system called AGNI ¢. We have developed AGNI communication mechanisms that offer reliable peer-to-peer communications, and that are integrated with our agent location tracking infrastructure to enable efficient, failure-resistant networking among highly mobile systems. We have analyzed the design parameters of our protocols using an in-situ simulation approach with validation through measurement of our prototype implementation in real distributed systems. Our system assumptions are simple and general enough to make our results applicable to other Agent systems that may adopt our protocols and/or design principles. £ 1 Introduction Mobile Agents are a convenient and powerful paradigm for structuring distributed systems. Using the Agent paradigm, work can be assigned to sequential, event-driven tasks that cooperate with each other to solve a distributed problem. In such systems, Agents roam the network accessing distributed information and resources while solving pieces of the problem. During the course of these computations Mobile Agents need to communicate among themselves to exchange state and status information, control and direct future behavior, and report results. The abstractions and protocol mechanisms that form the basis for inter-agent communications can significantly impact the overall design and effectiveness of Mobile Agent systems. Numerous approaches to inter-Agent communications are possible including RPC and mailboxes [3]. In this work we present a simple, ordered, reliable, one-way message protocol on top of which other abstractions can easily be built. Reliable, ordered one-way communication mechanisms greatly simplify the construction of most distributed applications. In traditional distributed applications, TCP [15] provides such services. Through decades of experience and re-engineering, TCP has evolved into a protocol that is highly effective at providing reliable end-toend data delivery over the conditions found in today's Internet (e.g., link failures, variable latencies, congestion loss). In this paper, we examine how to build a TCP-like reliable communication mechanism for Mobile Agent systems. The first question to be addressed is "Why we don't use the existing TCP?" We argue that Mobile Agent systems impose new communication requirements and problems that are not adequately addressed by conventional TCP, nor its potential minor variants. In particular, we are concerned with building failure resistant, rapidly re-configurable distributed systems. We view these system properties as a primary motivation for dynamic Agent creation and mobility mechanisms, and as posing significant requirements on inter-Agent communications mechanisms. As such, we require that Agent systems be able to (1) detect and recover from failures in the end-to-end transport mechanism and (2) accommodate efficient communication among mobile end-points. Neither of these capabilities can be provided using standard TCP. In the remainder of this paper we present the design and performance analysis of a reliable communication mechanism for Mobile Agent systems. Our protocol is presented in the context of a Mobile Agent system called AGNI, whose general design and capabilities have been described earlier [13]. Our communication mechanism ¢ AGNI stands for Agents at NIST and is also Sanskrit for fire. £ This work was supported in part by DARPA under the Autonomous Negotiation Teams (ANTS) program (AO # 99-H412/00). The work described in this paper is a research project and not an official US. Government endorsement of any product or protocol.
1997
Wireless communication with Mobile Computing devices is known to be problematic. It is very different in character from conventional communication over wired networks. Since many distributed applications make assumptions about network characteristics, they may not be used in a hostile mobile environment.