Design of Ajanta System for Mobile Agent Programming

Abstract

We describe the architecture and programming environment of Ajanta, a Java-based system for programming applications using mobile agents over the Internet. Agents are mobile objects which are hosted by servers on the network. Ajanta provides primitives for creating and dispatching agents, securely controlling agents at remote sites, and transferring agents from one server to another. For secureaccess to server resources by visiting agents, a proxy-based access control mechanism is used. The Ajanta design includes mechanisms to protect an agent's state and prevent misuse of its credentials. We describe in this paper migration patterns for programming an agent's travel path. A pattern encapsulates the abstract notion of agent mobility. Pattern composition allows one to build complextravel plans using some basic migration patterns. Finally,we present three agent-based distributed applications implemented using the Ajanta system. These include a middleware for sharing files over the Internet, a distributed calendar management system, and an agent-based middleware for distributed collaborations.