A Ratio-Based Update Scheme for Mobile Agent Location Management

Abstract

A location management scheme is critical for a mobile agent system to trace mobile agents and support on-the-go communications between peer agents. For the time being, most mobile agent location management schemes consist of both a tracking phase and a message delivery phase, and dutifully create or incur plenty of update messages and interaction messages in order to guarantee the effectiveness of the schemes. Excessive transmission of messages not only downgrades the overall performance of mobile agent location management scheme, but also causes network overhead. This paper proposes a ratio-based update scheme that can minimize the overall transmission costs of produced messages by intelligently adjusting the ratio between update messages and forwarding pointers. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme, which reveal that this scheme is general, adaptable, and possessed of higher granularity in the network latency. Moreover, the results also indicate that this scheme is better than previous schemes in optimizing the overall performance.Keywordsmobile agentlocation managementtracking phasemessage delivery phasenetwork latencyupdate messagesforwarding pointers