International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

Multi agent systems provide distributed computation for decentralized software applications. Mobile agents play an important role in realizing distributed systems. Current mobile agent implementations force a tightly coupled mechanism for migration by providing a mobile agent its destination address in advance. This requirement is both restricting and inflexible. In this paper, we propose a novel agent migration scheme that eliminates destination address information from the essential components of migration. Basically, an agent migrates between platforms as a specific type of a message over a communication system that implements topic based publish/subscribe paradigm. This approach allows for loosely coupled inter-platform mobility due to the communication model, resulting in a flexible and scalable execution environment. The paper also describes a new service oriented architecture for decentralized, peer-to-peer systems an information expert ecosystem, as an application of the proposed scheme.