On the efficient deployment of mobility in distributed system management

Mobile agents are frequently discussed as an enabling technology for meeting the requirements set by today´s and future networks and distributed systems. In particular, the growing number of disruptive links requires new architectures, and the characteristics of mobile agents make them an important new concept for such architectures. The paper addresses two major problems in conjunction with mobile agents which so far have received little attention in mobile agent research: the problem of nondeterminism and the problem of competing goals. A solution based on utility theory is presented and its applicability is demonstrated for distributed system management. A performance evaluation of a prototype implementation of this solution is also presented