A policy-based infrastructure for the dynamic control of agent mobility

There is an increasing research interest toward the mobility of software components. However, mobility adds complexity to the design of applications because programmers have to decide when, where and which components to migrate. The typical approach to mobility is to embed migration directives into component code at design time. This makes difficult to dynamically change migration strategies in order to adapt to evolving conditions of the execution environment. This paper advocates a policy-based approach for the specification and dynamic control of component mobility and presents a framework obtained by integrating a policy-based management system in a mobile agent environment.