Mobile Agents in Networking and Distributed Computing

Chapter 8

DISTRIBUTED CONTROL

JIANNONG CAO

Internet Computing and Mobile Computing Lab, Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

SAJAL K. DAS

Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas

YUDONG SUN

Computing Laboratory, Oxford University, Oxford, England

XIANBING WANG

School of Computers, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

8.1 INTRODUCTION

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in wide-area distributed applications running on a global network environment like the Internet. Due to its fast expansion, the Internet has become the platform of choice for many important applications that led to commercial and social activities being available through various services provided on the Internet. On the other hand, people have also seen the potential of the Internet on forming a supercomputing resource out of networked computers and research efforts have been made to develop wide-area parallel computing infrastructure that provide access to high-end computational capabilities on the Internet.

Another prevailing technology is mobile computing: ubiquitous access to information, data, and applications. Ubiquitous access refers to the ability for users to access these computing resources from almost any terminal, whether personal or public. The Internet established solid foundations for wide-area ubiquitous computing systems. Further ...