Evaluation of the Mobile Agents Technology: Comparison with the Client/Server Paradigm

This paper presents a performance evaluation of the mobile agent paradigm in comparison to the client/server paradigm. This evaluation has been conducted on top of the Java environment, using respectively RMI, the Aglets mobile agents platf orm and a mobile agents prototype that we implemented. The measurements give the cost of the basi c mechanisms involved in the implementation of a mobile agent platform, and a comparative evaluation of the two considered models (client/server and mobile agents) through two application sce arios. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained us ing mobile agents.