Evaluation of Migration Strategies for Mobile Agents in Network Routing

Thus far, we have seen a remarkable number of novel and efficient mobile agent schemes and systems developed and presented in the literature as part of the ongoing research in the field of mobile agents. Encouraging results have been reported in diverse areas of network management, in which different platforms for mobile agents' design have been used to achieve crucial networking tasks, such as routing. This paper contributes to the ongoing research by evaluating formal agent migration techniques, being one of the most important aspects to consider when designing mobile agent applications. Existing methods are discussed and evaluated through simulations over different network topologies. The results obtained emphasize the importance of considering the completion time required for each of the migration techniques to obtain minimum spanning trees during the routing process. Furthermore, a delay evaluation is performed for a sample program used to obtain optimum routing tables.