Agent chaining: an approach to dynamic mobile agent planning

The distributed agent concept has become a new computing paradigm in Internet distributed computing, including mobile computing. Mobile agent planning is one of the most important techniques for completing a given task efficiently. The static planning technique may not be the best approach in real network environments. For better performance, it is necessary that mobile agents be more sensitive to the network conditions. We propose a dynamic planning algorithm, named n-ary agent chaining, which is based on static mobile agent planning. Mobile agents can change their itinerary dynamically according to current network status using the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm also takes into account the locality of target nodes on the network. Thus, with a properly chosen locality factor it can adapt to realistic network situations. Agents reproduced from the original one, named cloned agents, process the unprocessed nodes in the proposed algorithm. Since the turn-around time can be calculated mathematically with known network statistics before launching the agents, the proposed algorithm is suitable for agent problem domains with deadline constraints.