Evaluation of Program Code Caching for Mobile Agent Migrations

Mobile agents are able to migrate among machines to achieve their tasks. This feature is attractive to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems because we can implement both client-side and server-side programming in one mobile agent. However, it involves the increase of data traffic for mobile agent migrations. In this paper, we propose program code caching to reduce the data traffic caused by mobile agent migrations. A mobile agent consists of many program codes that define a task executed in each machine they migrate; thus, the mobile agent migration involves the transfer of their program codes. Therefore, our method reduces the number of the transfer of program codes by using program code cache. We have implemented our method on a mobile agent framework called Maglog and conducted experiments on a meeting scheduling system.