Integrating Software Agents into the HTTP Caching Infrastructure

Mobile software agents are an increasingly important programming model within the World Wide Web (WWW). Typically programmed in Java or another machineindependent language, the code and associated data have the ability to move their execution from machine to machine, often revisiting the same machine multiple times. In such a case, caching the agent’s binaries can lead to a significant improvement in performance. However, existing agent systems generally do not address the issue of cache control via W3C standards. In this paper, we show the need for such systems and demonstrate this through combining IBM’s Aglets agent system with the Squid proxy cache. We give experimental results indicating that a loosely coupled system adds only approximately 25 ms. to agent invocation in cache control overhead, while giving speedups of almost 700 percent in certain network configurations through the use of the WWW caching infrastructure.