PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ' USING MOBILE AGENTS

Abstract

Large scale distributed [6] applications typically involve a number of nodes, which may be spread over a large geographical area. The Client Server (CS) [1 ] paradigm has been found useful for designing distributed applications. However, CS approach does not scale well when the number of participating nodes increase and build complex relations with one another. Also, increase in geographical spread and unreliable network connectivity pose problems for,,CS implementations. Mobile Agents (MA) [13] is emerging as a useful paradigm for overcoming the above limitations [4]. Mobile agents are an emerging technology attracting audiences fron`( the--" fields of distributed systems, information retrieval, World Wide Web[15], electronic commerce and artificial intelligence. In a broad sense; an agent is program that acts on the behalf of (Human) user. Then mobile agent is a program that represents a user in a heterogeneous computer network and can migrate autonomously from node to node, to perform some computation on the behalf of the user. The use of mobile software agent technology allows an agent in the form of program code, data, and an execution state to be packaged into a message and sent across the network to a remote computer. The agent may suspend its execution at any point, transport itself to another machine- and then resume execution.