Performance Analysis of Mobile Agents in Mobile Distributed Information Retrieval System - A Quantitative Case Study

The traditional client/server-based distributed system design paradigm demonstrates deficiencies in the mobile computing environment because it relies on network connectivity and reliable communication. The advances in mobile agent technology alleviate these problems. The execution autonomy of mobile agents relaxes the requirement on network connectivity and provides opportunities for conserving energy. To the best of our knowledge, in spite of the large body of research in the application and exploitation of agent-based technology, a quantitative comparison of systems implemented using the client/server and agent-based models is still missing and issues related to the energy efficiency of mobile agents remain unexplored. In this paper, we present a quantitative performance evaluation of these two models in terms of response time, energy consumption, and communication cost.