A mobile agent infrastructure with mobility and management support

The Internet has the potential to provide a global, integrative computing platform to share the resources, services and computing power. To explore the full potential of the Internet computing, a new computing paradigm is needed to exploit the Internet infrastructure in a configurable, scalable, and customizable way. Mobile agents have been shown to be promising in the Internet computing environment. They offer a configurable, scalable and active computing platform over the Internet. However, in the currently proposed approaches, users cannot retain controls after the mobile agents are dispatched. As a result, an extensive study of the issues involved in the management support is needed before the approaches can be commercially viable. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Pathfinder, which provides facilities and mechanisms for the mobility and management support of software agent that enable distributed application in the Internet environment. These unique features enhance openness, usability, and fault-tolerance of mobile agent systems. An implementation of the infrastructure is then described with the implementation issues discussed