A practical approach to agent migration protocol

Abstract

As the primary identifying characteristic of a mobile agent is its ability to migrate from host to host, a protocol to support agent mobility is a fundamental requirement of a mobile agent system. This work presents a novel agent migration protocol developed in the IMAGO system. The IMAGO (intelligent mobile agent gliding on-line) system is an infrastructure for prolog based, mobile agent applications. The major feature of this system is that it is capable of coping with both agent migration and inter-agent communication by deploying a simple agent migration protocol. This work focuses on the protocol stack specification as well as its implementation.