Using behavior templates to design remotely executing agents for wireless clients

ReAgents are remotely executing agents derived from behavior templates that support wireless clients in Internet applications. A reAgent is essentially a "one-shot" mobile agent that acts as an extension of a client, dynamically launched by the client to run on its behalf at a remote, more advantageous, location. Templates simplify the programming of reAgents by transparently handling data migration for remote execution, supporting custom communication protocols between the client and agent, and providing a general interface for programmers to implement their application-specific customizing logic. This simplification is made possible by the identification of characteristic behaviors, i.e., common patterns of actions that exploit the ability to process and communicate remotely. Examples of such behaviors are filtering, encoding/decoding, monitoring, caching, and distribution/collation. In this paper, we identify and analyze a set of core characteristic behaviors, describe how to program reAgents using behavior templates, and show that the overhead of using reAgents is low and outweighed by its benefits.