Decentralized Inter-agent Message Forwarding Protocols for Mobile Agent Systems

Abstract

Mobile agent technology has emerged as a promising programming paradigm for developing highly dynamic and large-scale service-oriented computing middleware due to its desirable features. For this purpose, first of all, scalable and location-transparent agent communication issue should be addressed in mobile agent systems despite agent mobility. In this paper, we present efficient distributed directory service and message delivery protocols based on forwarding pointers to significantly reduce the length of chains of forwarding pointers by forcing the corresponding service host to maintain each mobile agent’s pointer only after every k(k > 1) migrations finished. This feature results in low message forwarding overhead and low storage and maintenance cost of increasing chains of pointers per host. Additionally, they enable each sending agent to communicate with mobile agents more faster than previous protocols by effectively using their location information in the sending agent’s binding cache.