Chapter 9
Distributed Databases and Transaction Processing
9.1 INTRODUCTION
Mobile software agents have been used to provide an alternative way of implementing distributed applications. Mobile agents are programs that may be dispatched from a client computer and transported to a remote server computer for execution [1].
Software systems built using mobile agents allow flexibility in designing applications and extensibility, since mobile agents can be launched without requiring any preinstallation besides the existence of an efficient execution platform to host agents. They support an asynchronous mode of operation, which can be useful with intermittent connectivity, as is often the case with mobile wireless computing. Mobile agents may also reduce the communication overhead by moving the computation closer to the data. Another major advantage of mobile agents is that agents can roam the network to collect information, thus offering an attractive way to discover data in unknown networks.
The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the use of mobile agents in distributed database systems and applications. Mobile agents have been used to derive extended database architectures that divide functionality between database clients and servers in a more flexible way than the one achieved by traditional ...
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