Design Issues in Mobile Agent Programming Systems

Abstract

We describe the mobile agent paradigm which is becoming increasingly popular for network-centric programming, and compare it with earlier paradigms for distributed computing from which it has evolved. The design of mobile agent systems requires the resolution of several system-level issues, such as the provision of code mobility, portability and scalability on wide-area heterogeneous networks, and a host of security-related problems that go hand-in-hand with mobile code. Agent programming requires suitable languages and programming models that can support code mobility, and runtime systems that provide some fundamental primitives for the creation, migration and management of agents. We discuss these requirements and then describe six mobile agent systems which illustrate different approaches taken by designers to address the problems.