CARLA - a CORBA-based ARchitecture for Lightweight Agents

The field of mobile agents now plays an increasing role in modern information technology, especially in the light of advancing developments of handheld devices. In our CARLA project, we are developing an architecture for Java-based mobile agents to be used on small devices, which relies on CORBA as its basic communication infrastructure. To this end, the architecture falls back on the minimumCORBA specification, which is a reduced variant of the full CORBA specification. However, although minimumCORBA requires less memory than its "big brother", further measures have to be taken to efficiently use the restricted resources on handheld devices. In this paper, we describe some results of our work on the CARLA architecture which are related to the question of reducing the memory footprint of CORBA-based mobile agents and their runtime environment for use on handheld devices. We present different approaches and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.