Messages with implicit destinations as mobile agents

Applications running over decentralized systems, distribute their computation on nodes/agents, which exchange data and services through messages. In many cases, the provenance of the data or service is not relevant, and applications can be optimized by choosing the most efficient solution to obtain them. We introduce a framework which allows messages with intensional destination, which can be seen as restricted mobile agents, specifying the desired service but not the exact node that carries it, leaving to the system the task of evaluating the extensional destination, that is an explicit address for that service. The intensional destinations are defined using queries that are evaluated by other agents while routing. We introduce the Questlog language, which allows to reformulate queries, and express complex strategies to pull distributed data. In addition, intensional addresses offer persistency to dynamic systems with nodes/agents leaving the system. We demonstrate the approach with examples taken from sensor networks, and show some experimental results on the QuestMonitor platform.