2.5 Possible Application Domains of Mobile Agents 27
functions, constitute only the least common denominator of all possible
clients. As a consequence, most of the interface functions are more or
less pr imitive, and clients will probably have to use a workflow connect-
ing these functions in order to execute a complex, user-driven operation.
If the communication overhead for exchanging messages between client
and server is high compared with the execution time of each function,
it would make sense to offer aggregated and more advanced functions
as combinations of the primitive ones. However, because it is difficult
to track down every possible scenario in advance or even during runtime,
these functions are usually not offered by the server’s multi-purpose ...