Mobile Agent Building Block of Distributed Systems

3186 Words7 Pages

Abstract. This paper is about mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes distributed systems very much easier to execute, design, and sustain. The benefits of mobile agents are discussed in the paper and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems. Mobile agents decrease the network traffic, grant an effective means of overcoming network latency, and perhaps most importantly, through their potential to manage asynchronously and autonomously of the process that created them, helps to construct more fault-tolerant and robust. Read on and let us introduce to software agent’s i.e the mobile as well as the stationary ones. Before concluding this paper we come up with a brief outline of some existing mobile agent systems.

1. Introduction

What is a software agent, what makes an agent, and how it is different from a normal program, has been deeply discussed for several years now. Thus we define agents as “programs that help people and act on their behalf”.

Agents function by allowing people to hand over work to them. Agents come in several different types with many different settings. Agents are found in computer operating systems, networks, databases, and so on. Now the question arises that what properties do these agents share that compose the core of being an agent? Agents have the ability to interact with their execution environment, and to act asynchronously and autonomously upon it. No one is required either to deliver information to the agent or to consume any of its output. The agent simply acts continuously in pursuit of its own goals. In contrast to software objects of object-oriented programming, agents are active entities that work according to the so-called Hollywood Principle: "Don't cal...

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...er Science Dart mouth College Hanover, NH 03755 {rgray,dfk,saurab,rus,gvc}@cs.dartmouth.edu.

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