Mobile Agents in Networking and Distributed Computing

Chapter 10

Mobile Agents in Mobile and Wireless Computing

PING YU and JIAN LU

State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology at Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, P.R. China

JIANNONG CAO

Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

10.1 INTRODUCTION

Mobile and wireless computing raises new challenging problems due to the diverse types of devices used, user mobility, and dynamic nature in network conditions and execution context [1]. Mobile devices [e.g., laptop, personal digital assistant (PDA), mobile phone] do not have a permanent connection to the network and are often disconnected for long periods of time. When a device is reconnected to a network, the performance of the network connection can vary dramatically from the previous connection; the connection often has low bandwidth and high latency and is prone to sudden failures.

To provide support for building mobile computing applications, research in the field of middleware systems has proliferated in recent years. A middleware is a software system that connects two otherwise separate distributed entities, serving as the glue between application and service components in a distributed system. It handles network communication and distributed processing issues, providing application developers with a higher layer of abstraction [2]. A number of research projects have been exploring how to build mobile applications with the support of a middleware [3]. Several efforts focus on ...