This paper aims to investigate the use of mobile agents for service provision in mobile computing environments. A quantitative model and experimental measurements are performed to compare Java RMI and mobile agents in the special context of software downloading. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained using mobile agents. In addition, twoagent-based services, namely Service Download and Service Discovery,are proposed to illustrate the benefits of using mobile agents for service provision and their potential impacts on mobile computing environments.
Ouahiba Fouial, Nadia Boukhatem, Isabelle M. Demeu