Communication and tracking infrastructure of a mobile agent system

Objects are reactive in the sense that they change state only when one of their methods is invoked by other objects. Reactive objects are sufficient in a client-server model of computation with a remote invocation mechanism “a la RPC”. However active objects are much more powerful mainly because they are autonomous entities. Epidaure´s objects are a particular type of active objects from which multi-agent systems can be built. In the context of mobility, migration becomes a necessity. For instance, a mobile client may disconnect from its server and reconnect to another server at a later time. In this paper we describe in a detailed manner the communication mechanism of a particular multi-agent system, Epidaure, and how the communication algorithm and mobility protocols that we developed can be applied to address problems related to mobile objects (e.g., registration, transport, tracking, …)