D'Agents: Applications and performance of a mobile-agent system

D'Agents is a general-purpose mobile-agent system that has been used in several informationretrieval applications. In this paper, we first examine one such application, operational support for military field personnel, where D'Agents greatly simplifies the task of providing efficient, applicationspecific access to remote information resources. After describing the application, we discuss the key differences between D'Agents and most other mobile-agent systems, notably its support for strong mobility and multiple agent languages. Finally, we derive a small, simple application that is representative of many information-retrieval tasks, including those in the example application, and use this application to compare the scalability of mobile agents and traditional client/server approaches. The results confirm and quantify the usefulness of mobile code, and perhaps more importantly, confirm that intuition about when to use mobile code is usually correct. Although significant...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SPE
• Authors: Robert S. Gray, George Cybenko, David Kotz, Ronald A. Peterson, Daniela Rus
• Keywords: Military Field Personnel, Mobile Agents, Mobile Code, SPE 2002