A Mobile Agent Prototype For Autonomous Multimedia Information Access, Interaction, And Retrieval

With an abundance of data resources and vast amounts of multimedia information available on-line it is often tedious and bandwidth wasting for users to manually search for desired information. The mobile agent paradigm in which the program moves to the data has definitive advantages over client-server computing in which computation occurs over a network. Additionally, the asynchronous nature of agents allows users to migrate or log out while the agent continues to work on other nodes on the network. However, the potential complexity of mobile agent operation requires that protocols exist on several levels to coordinate these activities. This paper focuses on three aspects of an experimental mobile agent system called AgentSys : (i) AgenTalk, an inter-agent communication protocol, (ii) AgenTransfer, an inter-node transfer protocol for agents and their multimedia cargo, and (iii) the architecture of the Agent Execution Environments which host and support mobile agents as they collect data. This paper provides a general discussion of the protocols and requirements of a multimedia mobile agent system.