On the use of IP multicast to facilitate group communication between mobile agents

The use of multiple agents (in patterns such as master-slave and embassy) as stated in S. C. Hayden et al. (1999) is a common technique in agent-based systems. Maintaining coordination and communication between groups of agents, whilst relatively simple in the non-distributed paradigm, can impose a significant overhead on the developers of distributed/mobile agent systems. We report the design, implementation, and evaluation of a group communications mechanism for multiple agents systems.