Providing applications with mobile agent technology

Abstract

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and their application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work has produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products. However, despite the positive results, we feel that mobile agent technology is still not ready to enter the path of mainstream software development. In our perspective, one of the main reasons for this situation arises from the traditional approach to mobile agent technology. This approach, based on the familiar concept of the mobile-agent distributed platform as an extension of the operating system, focuses too much on the mobile agents and associated issues (mobility, agent lifecycle, security, coordination, etc.) and provides poor support for the development of applications where mobile agents are just one of several available technologies. Learning from past experience, we are now working on a new approach where the focus is brought back to the applications and mobile agents become just one the tools available to develop distributed systems. This provides a much lighter framework for application-based mobile agent systems. This paper presents the lessons learned from our previous project and discusses the new concept we are developing: application-centric mobile agent systems.