Efficient dissemination of mobile agents

An often claimed benefit of mobile agent technology is that it reduces communication cost, but there is hardly any scenario in which this advantage has been proven or quantified on an Internet scale. One important reason for this lack of quantification is that agent systems do not have global knowledge about the quality of network connections between arbitrary agent platforms and data servers. We present an approach for representing a network in a way that allows to derive approximately the quality of network connections between agent platforms and data servers. By using this representation we provide an algorithm which computes a schedule for the efficient dissemination of a mobile agent. The experimental validation of our approach shows that communication cost can be reduced by more than 50 percent in many situations