Chapter 12
Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agent Platforms and Comparison with Client—Server Technologies
12.1 INTRODUCTION
Mobile agents are autonomous programs that can migrate through the machines of the network to accomplish some tasks on behalf of some user. The agents carry their code and their internal data while they are migrating between different machines. According to [1] mobile code can be seen as the merging of two concepts that have been successfully deployed in distributed computing: code-on-demand and remote evaluation. In both cases, the mobility of code is only between a client and a single server. Mobile agents go further than these concepts since the agents can migrate across several machines and provide a more decentralized approach.
According to [2] there is a potential list of advantages for using mobile agent technology, namely, mobile agents reduce the network traffic, give support for disconnected computing, facilitate the process of software upgrading and introduction of new services in the network, and achieve higher scalability and easy integration with legacy systems. During almost a decade there has been intensive research in this paradigm, taken as an assumption that mobile agents can bring some clear advantages against traditional client-server solutions [3].
Tens of papers have been published in the literature and several commercial mobile agent ...
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