Seven good reasons for mobile agents

Dispatch your agents; shut off your machine. Mobility is an orthogonal property of agents, that is, not all agents are mobile. An agent can just sit there and communicate with its environment through conventional means, such as remote procedure calling and messaging. We call agents that do not or cannot move " stationary agents. " A stationary agent executes only on the system on which it begins execution. If it needs information not on that system or needs to interact with an agent on another system, it typically uses a communication mechanism, such as remote procedure calling. In contrast, a mobile agent is not bound to the system on which it begins execution [1]. It is free to travel among the hosts in the network. Created in one execution environment, it can transport its state and code with it to another execution environment in the network, where it resumes execution. The term " state " typically means the attribute values of the agent that help it determine what to do when it resumes execution at its destination. Code in an object-oriented context means the class code necessary for an agent to execute. A mobile agent has the unique ability to transport itself from one system in a network to another in the same network. This ability allows it to move to a system containing an object with which it wants to interact and then to take advantage of being in the same host or network as the object. Our interest in mobile agents is not motivated by the technology per se but rather by the benefits agents provide for creating distributed systems. There are at least seven main benefits, or good reasons, to start using mobile agents: They reduce the network load. Distributed systems often rely on communication protocols involving multiple interactions to accomplish a given task. The result is a lot of network traffic. Mobile agents allow users to package a conversation and dispatch it to a destination host where interactions take place locally. Mobile agents are also useful when reducing the flow of raw data in the network. When very large volumes of data are stored at remote hosts, that data should be processed in its locality rather than transferred over the network. The motto for agent-based data processing is simple: Move the computation to the data rather than the data to the computation. They overcome network latency. …