Awareness and agility for autonomic distributed systems: platform-independent and publish-subscribe event-based communication for mobile agents

We propose using the publish-subscribe model to complement proprietary or standard agent communication languages, useful particularly in the case of exchanging and disseminating short communications about events and consequently, reducing complexity of multi-agent messaging. We describe how we implemented the event notification mechanism for mobile agents, and analyse experiments that demonstrate the Elvin-based event notification mechanism for communication between Grasshopper agents and aglets. We also discuss message loss due to agent migration and offer solutions to reliable communication between mobile agents using events.