Comparison and Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agent Platforms

Abstract

Mobile agents are considered a very interesting technology to develop applications for mobile, pervasive, and distributed computing. Thus, they present a combination of unique features, such as their autonomy and capability to move to remote computers to process data there and save remote communications. Many mobile agent platforms have been developed since the late nineties. While some of them have been abandoned, others continue releasing new versions that fix bugs detected or offer new interesting features. Moreover, other new platforms have appeared in the last few years. So, a common problem when one wants to benefit from mobile agent technology to develop distributed applications is the decision about which platform to use. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date evaluation of existing mobile agent platforms. We compare them qualitatively and evaluate their performance.