Using Multiple Communication Channels in a Mobile Agent Platform

This paper describes a flexible architecture that enables the adoption of additional communication channels in a mobile agent platform. The architecture extends an already implemented Web Service [1] based mobile agent platform by replacing communication mechanisms with more advanced components, and without modifying the platform's core components. The proposed architecture uses well-known design patterns to better define its distinguishing parts. Sockets are used as the first alternate to SOAP communication. Finally, the two different communication channels are compared and benchmarked.