A Hierarchical Dynamic Monitoring Mechanism for Mobile Agent Location

Abstract

Mobile agent location monitoring is a necessary mechanism for mobile agent system. Most mobile agent systems do not provide a mobile agent location monitoring mechanism, e.g. Mole (J. Baumann et al., 1998), D'Agents, Concordia (1998) and Grasshdoper (2001). Even though the IBM Aglets system provides a location monitoring mechanism, it has adopted the centralized monitoring mechanism. The centralized monitoring machine is not suitable for huge mobile agents because location information processing exists as a bottleneck issue, and also the system lacks scalability. In this paper, the method proposed is a distributive mechanism for delivering MMA (mobile monitor agent) to the network node (agent server) of a mobile agent system. The MMA can be treated as a regional monitoring platform. It is responsible for collecting a mobile agent's information instantly in its monitoring area. Furthermore, the users can also inquire about their own mobile agent's current location and working status. The above mentioned mechanism is to distribute MMA dynamically to solve the hierarchical monitoring mechanism scalability issue, and still keeps the advantages of hierarchical monitoring mechanism to decrease information processing bottleneck issue which the centralized monitoring mechanism encounters.