Distributed Mobile Computing: Development of Distributed Applications Using Mobile Agents

There exist distributed scenarios in which the need for dynamism, mobility, and adaptivity, has to be addressed with highly dynamical approaches. These scenarios present different challenges and difficulties: efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed data sources, dynamic load balancing, unstable connections and communication failures, etc. So, different approaches and middleware have appeared to tackle these challenges and help the developer of distributed applications. In particular, mobile agent technology can provide significant advantages for the development of applications in these contexts. In this paper, we emphasize the benefits that mobile agents can provide to distributed systems by illustrating them with real distributed systems that we have developed in our research group. Mobile agents play a key role in all the scenarios presented: 1) They are able to track the relevant data and computers involved in a certain computation, 2) they move the processing tasks wherever they are needed to ensure a good performance, and 3) they adapt themselves to changes in their execution environment.