An architectural model for mobile agent-based applications.

Abstract

Recently, several important trends have emerged in the context of the rapidly expanding Internet, including increased consumption of network bandwidth as multimedia applications become more heavily used, strong consumer pressure for more powerful tools for efficiently navigating through the immense volumes of information available on the Internet and user demand for services that are customized to the user's individual needs. Mobile agents possess many of the attributes required to address these trends. Mobile agents can be generally defined as software entities that migrate through a network and perform processing functions on a client's behalf at remote sites. Mobile agents contain executable software scripts that are interpreted by each network site that is visited. By migrating the processing functions that are traditionally performed at the client site to a remote server, mobile agents represent a new paradigm for network communications. This thesis describes a mobile agent architectural model that is capable of efficiently supporting multimedia applications. The architectural model describes an internal system architecture based on a set of re-useable architectural building blocks. Another key facet of the architectural model is the specification of an application-independent structure for mobile agents and the integration of this structure into an application layer protocol. The application protocol, referred to as Mobile Agent Protocol (MAP), is specifically designed to enable mobile agents to travel through the network in a secure and efficient manner; the protocol is based on the TCP/IP protocol stack and is specified using Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN. 1).