Transportable agents support worldwide applications

Abstract

Worldwide applications exist in an environment that is inherently distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, insecure, unreliable, and unpredictable. In particular, the latency and bandwidth of network connections varies tremendously from place to place and time to time, particularly when considering wireless networks, mobile devices, and satellite connections. Applications in this environment must be able to adapt to different and changing conditions. We believe that transportable autonomous agents provide an excellent mechanism for the construction of such applications. We describe our prototype transportable-agent system and several applications.