Ajanta - A System for Mobile Agent Programming

This paper gives an overview of Ajanta, a Java-based system for mobile agent programming. We discuss the Ajanta architecture, and elaborate on the mechanisms used to provide object mobility, and secure execution of mobile agents in connned protection domains. The agent programming environment is deened, in terms of a set of primitive operations. A proxy-based ne-grained access control mechanism for application-deened resources is described. We show how it can be adapted to provide secure inter-agent communication. We also describe a scheme for agent migration control that we have developed, based on the composition of some fundamental migration patterns. These patterns encapsulate the abstract notion of agent mobility, and incorporate some failure recovery mechanisms.

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