A multimedia transportable agent system.

Abstract

This thesis addresses the emerging field of mobile agents. The mobile agent communication paradigm is viewed as the extension of the client/server communication model. Mobile agents are self-contained objects that travel autonomously in a computer network, executing on different machines until their assigned task is solved. Mobile agents offer many advantages over the client/server model such as asynchronous operation and support for mobile users and lightweight devices but also new issues and challenges such as security and privacy. A multimedia mobile agent system is designed and implemented to asynchronously execute tasks on behalf of the user. The mobile agent system is composed of a multimedia agent platform and agent-based applications. The agent platform provides a migration facilitator, an agent execution environment, an agent transport protocol and a simple API to the basic agent operations such as build and jump. The agent-based applications are built on top of the agent platform and offer asycnchronous services such as search, retrieve and send multimedia documents. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)