A model of mobile agent services enhanced for resource restrictions and security

Abstract

Mobile agent technologies are becoming popular as an efficient way to access network resources. Because an application using mobile agents has some unique problems caused by frequent creation, migration and disappearance of mobile agents, a mobile agent platform has to provide not only agents and their execution engines but some functions and mechanisms which are specialized to mobile agent systems. We discuss the practical problems occurring in mobile agent environments, that is, agent controllability, resource restrictions and security. To solve these problems, we propose a mobile agent platform, called SFM (Secured Floating Market) model. This model fulfils the agent controllability by agent control parameters and has the measures against the resource restrictions such as location of resources and agents, processing capability and condition of load. Besides, this model guarantees some suitable security strength levels for flexible execution of various services and user requirements. We implement the prototype of this model using Aglets.