A Mobile Agent-Based Middleware for Opportunistic Resource Allocation and Communications

Dependable communication capabilities are amongst the most important technical requirements for mission success in military combat operations. This paper introduces a mobile agent-based middleware that supports both point-to-point messaging and hierarchical data-streaming. Two infrastructure technologies (Mockets and FlexFeed) are introduced as service providers for messaging and publish-subscriber models for data streaming. Opportunistic resource allocation and monitoring are handled by distributed coordination algorithms, implemented here through two complementary technologies: Stand-In Agents and Acquaintance models.