Strategically migrating agents in itinerary graph

Mobile agent need migrate to several hosts for accomplishing its task. Migration strategy is responsible for planning out an optimal migration path, which ensures mobile agent to complete its task correctly and efficiently at the minimum cost. The paper introduces the concept of itinerary graph and presents three migration strategies based on it. Itinerary graph not only describes the migration semantics of mobile agent but also reflects the changes of software and hardware environment where mobile agent lives. During its travel, mobile agent equipped with itinerary graph perceives these changes, react quickly, modify its migration path autonomously and accomplish its task according to certain specified criterions, which embody the reactivity and autonomy of agent. Besides improving the efficiency, these migration strategies enhances the performance of mobile agent system because they avoid migration failure resulted from network disconnection or node crashing.