Chapter
3
Mobile Agent Migration
After looking at mobile agents from the application point of view, we now
focus on the migration process. Earlier we explained agent migration sim-
ply as the process of transferring a mobile agent from one computer system
to another. In this chapter we go into technical detail on this issue.
First, we develop a generic framework to describe the migration process
as it is implemented in almost all mobile agent toolkits today. Along the
way, we introduce the main concepts of the Java programming language
that are important in implementing the migration process and come back
to the main advantage of mobile agents: saving network bandwidth by mov-
ing the code close to the data. We develop a mathematical model to compare ...