Mobile agent

In computer science, a mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data which is able to migrate (move) from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer.

Definition and overview

A Mobile Agent, namely, is a type of software agent, with the feature of autonomy, social ability, learning, and most importantly, mobility.

More specifically, a mobile agent is a process that can transport its state from one environment to another, with its data intact, and be capable of performing appropriately in the new environment. Mobile agents decide when and where to move. Movement is often evolved from RPC methods. Just as a user directs an Internet browser to "visit" a website (the browser merely downloads a copy of the site or one version of it in the case of dynamic web sites), similarly, a mobile agent accomplishes a move through data duplication. When a mobile agent decides to move, it saves its own state, transports this saved state to the new host, and resumes execution from the saved state.

A mobile agent is a specific form of mobile code. However, in contrast to the Remote evaluation and Code on demand programming paradigms, mobile agents are active in that they can choose to migrate between computers at any time during their execution. This makes them a powerful tool for implementing distributed applications in a computer network.

An open multi-agent systems (MAS) is a system in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system.

Reputation and Trust

The following are general concerns about the Trust and Reputation in Mobile Agent research area:

1. Source of trust information

• Direct experience
• Witness information
• Role-based rules
• Third-party references

2. How trust value is calculated

3. Overall trust value

What are the difference between trust and reputation system?

Trust systems produce a score that reflects the relying party’s subjective view of an entity’s trustworthiness, whereas reputation systems produce an entity’s (pub- lic) reputation score as seen by the whole community.

More:

• Compare Reputation and Trust

Advantages

Some advantages which mobile agents have over conventional agents:

• Computation bundles - converts computational client/server round trips to relocatable data bundles, reducing network load.
• Parallel processing -asynchronous execution on multiple heterogeneous network hosts
• Dynamic adaptation - actions are dependent on the state of the host environment
• Tolerant to network faults - able to operate without an active connection between client and server
• Flexible maintenance - to change an agent's actions, only the source (rather than the computation hosts) must be updated

One particular advantage for remote deployment of software includes increased portability thereby making system requirements less influential.

Application of mobile agents

Common applications include:

• Resource availability, discovery, monitoring
• Information retrieval, system information collection, support operations in client/server paradigm

system information

• Network management, remote collection of network throughput, available bandwidth monitoring, other remote machine network parameters
• Data replication and colation, server configuration backup, file collecting & sorting, other remote machine data backup

making backup

• Dynamic software deployment, remote install monitoring & gauging

See also

• Java Aglets
• Fraglets

External links

• Seven Good Reasons for Mobile Agents
• Mobile Agent Technologies, developer of AgentOS agent based operating system. Inventor of Automatic Thread Migration (ATM).
• National Institute for Standards and Technology, hosts a center for investigating security of mobile agents.
• AgentLink III
• Mobile-C, a multi-agent platform for mobile C/C++ agents.
• JADE, an OSS mobile agent framework written in JAVA.
• The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, a standards body which defines an interface for agent based interactions.
• Secure Mobile Agents Project, a project to develop a secure mobile agent server (last release 2007).