Supporting remote reference updating through garbage collection in a mobile object system

Programming paradigms based on object mobility, such as mobile agents, can greatly contribute in designing distributed applications, but also introduce issues which are not present when objects are statically bound to their execution environments. Auxiliary mechanisms are necessary in order to allow an application to control mobile objects as well as to provide mobile agents with the capability of interacting with each other despite of mobility. The work described in this paper deals with how to build a mobile objects system based on the Java distributed object model. In particular we describe how to take advantage of the Java RMI's distributed garbage collector to implement an effective remote reference updating scheme, necessary, to support object interaction even in the presence of mobility.