Locating mobile agents through distributed mechanisms

Abstract

Mobile agents are processes that may be dispatched from a source computer and be transported to remote servers for execution. In any mobile agent system, the ability to communicate with agents in real-time is essential for retrieving any data or information that they have collected, and for supporting coordination and cooperation among them. Communication with a mobile agent requires the ability to track it. In the thesis, we propose several distributed mechanisms for tracking (or locating) mobile agents. We first propose a method based on distributed hashing table (DHT) to locate mobile agents efficiently in a large-scale network. The idea is to treat mobile agents and hosts similarly to the way peers are treated in a peer-to-peer system, and to implement a lookup protocol that is based on that principle, while taking care of the mobile nature of the agents. We then introduce a new locating mechanism. Our technique is based on appropriate delays that the mobile agents must perform while moving on the network so to facilitate its tracking, should it be needed. The searching agent computes a particular searching path that will guarantee the tracking within one traversal of the network. We indicate various strategies, and we perform experiments for computing the searching path and for comparing their performances in synchronous and asynchronous settings, in arbitrary and specific topologies.