Debugging Mobile Agent Systems

A mobile agent is an autonomous software module that can migrate between different computers. A mobile agent is designed and implemented like a human, and mobile agents work together by interactions among them like a human community. Thus, a mobile agent technology is helpful when we develop distributed systems with an easy-to-understand design and implementations for humans. Many researchers have proposed various applications through mobile agent technologies. However, mobile agent technologies are not used much as compared to other networking or programming technologies in the real world because migrations of mobile agents make it difficult to debug the system. This paper discusses problems of mobile agents for debugging, and proposes a remote debugger in order to solve these problems. Our proposed remote debugger supports functions of searching, single stepping execution, breaking, and viewing variables for a mobile agent who behaves with migrations on a running system.