A proxy-based communication protocol for mobile agents: protocols and performance

Although the mobile agent paradigm provides great potential advantages ever traditional approaches in distributed computing applications, there are still several issues to be addressed before the technology can be widely accepted. The performance of the communication protocol is one of the critical issues in mobile agent systems. A practical communication protocol for mobile agents must satisfy three basic requirements: location transparency, reliability and efficiency. Although many communication protocols have been proposed for mobile agent systems and most of them are location transparent, these protocols usually compromise some aspects of reliability and efficiency. In this research we develop a communication scheme for efficient location tracking of agents and reliable message delivery in mobile agent systems by using a proxy-based scheme. The location update and message delivery protocols are developed and shown to be reliable even when agents migrate during message delivery. A simulation model is developed to estimate the performance relative to a (nonproxy-based) home-server protocol. Sensitivity analysis is used to reveal the important circumstances (domain/agent dimensions and exogenous demand/movement characteristics) for efficient communication performance.