IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF LOCATION MANAGEMENT PROTOCOLS IN A MULTI •REGION MOBILE AGENT ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Mobile agent technology has received enormous attention from researchers, application developers and customers over the last few years. Many developments of mobile agent systems are under way in both academic and industrial environments. To track the current location of a mobile agent is a critical problem in mobile agent based computing and still represents an open research problem. Location management is fundamental to further the development of mobile agent systems in a multi-region environment in order to control and communicate with agents after launching. Existing approaches for locating mobile agents are not efficient as these do not consider the effect of location updates on migration time and produce network overhead. Moreover, interactive agent-agent (many-to-many) and owner-agent communication facility is not provided for. This report presents two novel protocols for mobile agent location management in distributed systems and a facility for interactive agent-agent and owner-agent communication. A modification is proposed to the Search-by-Path-Chase (SPC) protocol proposed by Stefano et al, for locating mobile agents. This protocol reduces location update time for an agent during migration and network overhead. A second protocol is also proposed, which not only reduces migration overhead but also reduces the time to locate the mobile agents. The above approaches and the new communication facility has been implemented and tested on the PMADE mobile agent system developed at IITRoorkee. Performance comparison of these protocols is also presented. With the interactive agent-agent and owner-agent communication facility, any agent can communicate with more than one agent.simultaneously. This dissertation work is developed using Sun Java 2v1.4.2, PMAt E