Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing

Describes a framework for itinerant agents that can be used to implement secure, remote applications in large, public networks such as the Internet or the IBM Global Network. Itinerant agents are programs, dispatched from a source computer, that roam among a set of networked servers until they accomplish their task. This is an extension to the client/server model in which the client sends a portion of itself to the server for execution. An additional feature of itinerant agents is their ability to migrate from server to server, perhaps seeking one that can help with the user's task or perhaps collecting information from all of them. A major focus of the article is the agent meeting point, an abstraction that supports the interaction of agents with each other and server based resources The article begins with an overview of the operation of an itinerant agent framework and a review of previous work. The authors consider likely applications of itinerant agents and discuss one specific example in detail. They give an architectural description of the structure of itinerant agents, the languages employed to create them, and the execution environments required at the servers; and also a detailed description of how an itinerant agent is processed at a server. Security issues are then discussed and finally they consider the technical advantages of the itinerant agent framework and the services it enables. >

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