In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in
autonomous mobile objects and mobile agent systems. Several
mobile agent programming platforms have been developed by the
research community to support mobile programs in distributed
systems. Most of today's commonly used mobile agent platforms are
designed and implemented using Java and its security
architecture. Agents are implemented as transportable Java objects.
This tutorial presents an overview of the various design issues in a
mobile agent programming system. These include migration support,
global naming, inter-agent communication, protection of host
resources, protection of agent state, agent authorization, etc. This
tutorial surveys a number of Java-based agent programming systems with
respect to these design issues. These include Aglets, Ajanta,
Concordia, D'Agents, Mole, and Voyager. Finally, a number of
potential applications of the mobile agent paradigm are discussed and
conclusions are drawn based on the reported experiences.
Audience:
Researchers, educators, systems programmers and application
developers who want to gain a better understanding of the benefits and
limitations of the mobile agent paradigm.
Required experience:
Some familiarity with basic concepts in distributed computing with objects; some familiarity with Java's programming model.
Presenter's profile:
Anand Tripathi is an Associate Professor at the University of
Minnesota. He received Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the
University of Texas at Austin in 1980. His current
research is in secure distributed computing using mobile agents.
His group has developed a mobile agent system called Ajanta.