Mobile agents represent a promising technology for the development of Internet applications. However, mobile computational entities introduce peculiar problems w.r.t. the coordination of the application components. The paper outlines the advantages of Linda-like coordination models, and shows how a programmable coordination model based on reactive tuple spaces can provide further desirable features for Internet applications based on mobile agents. Accordingly, the paper presents the design and the implementation of the MARS coordination architecture for Java-based mobile agents. MARS defines Linda-like tuple spaces, which can be programmed to react with specific actions to the accesses made by mobile agents.

Hive is a distributed agents platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an "ecology of distributed agents" and its implementation in a practical Java based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents, and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking "Things That Think," putting computation and communication in everyday places such as your shoes, your kitchen, or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agents architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on the fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive.

Security is an important issue for the widespread deployment of applications based on software agent technology. It is generally agreed that without the proper countermeasures in place, use of agent-based applications will be severely impeded. However, not all applications require the same set of countermeasures, nor can they depend entirely on the agent system to provide them. Instead, countermeasures are applied commensurate with the anticipated threat profile and intended security objectives for the application. While countermeasures typically include any action, device, procedure, technique, or other measure that reduces the vulnerability of or threat to a system, our focus here is specifically on technical mechanisms, as opposed to procedural or non-technical measures. Such countermeasures can be integrated directly into an agent system, or incorporated into the design of an agent to supplement the capabilities of an underlying agent system. This paper gives an overview of the t...

Intelligent Environments (IEs) have specific computational properties that generally distinguish them from other computational systems.

and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made.

This paper proposes a Java bytecode transformation algorithm for realizing transparent thread migration in a portable and efficient manner. In contrast to previous studies, our approach does not need extended virtual machines nor source code of target programs. The whole state of stack frames is saved, and then restored at a remote site. To accomplish this goal, a type system for Java bytecode is used to correctly determine valid frame variables and valid entries in the operand stack. A target program is transformed based on the type information into a form so that it can perform transparent thread migration. We have also measured execution efficiency of transformed programs and growth in bytecode size, and obtained better results compared to previous studies.

Electronic commerce technology o ers the opportunity tointegrate and optimize the global production and distribution supply chain. The computers of the various corporations, located throughout the world, will communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and con rm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales. In this paper we describe MAgNET, a system for networked electronic trading, that is based on the Java mobile agent technology, called aglets. Aglets are dispatched by the buyer to the various suppliers, where they negotiate orders and deliveries, returning to the buyer with their best deals for approval. MAgNET handles the deep supply chain, where a supplier may need to contact further suppliers of subcomponents in order to respond to an enquiry. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using the Java aglet technology for electronic commerce.

We believe that the challenges faced by future network applications, such as scalability, adaptability, and survivability/availability, have already been overcome by large scale biological systems and that future network applications will benefit by adopting key biological principles and mechanisms. Our initial effort at applying biological principles and mechanisms to the design and implementation of network applications has produced the Bio-Networking Architecture. The Bio-Networking Architecture is a paradigm as well as middleware for the design and implementation of scalable, adaptive, and survivable/available network applications. In the Bio-Networking Architecture, a collection of autonomous mobile agents, called cyber-entities, are used to implement an application. A cyber-entity is analogous to an individual bee in a bee colony. The desirable characteristics of an application, i.e. scalability, adaptability, and survivability/availability, emerge from the collective actions and interactions of its constituent cyber-entities. We describe a web content distribution application called Aphid, which was designed using the Bio-Networking Architecture. Through simulations, we show that Aphid adapts to changing user demand and location. Aphid’s scalability and survivability/availability are also demonstrated through simulations. 1

This paper will lead you into the world of mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes it very much easier to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems. You will find that mobile agents reduce the network traffic, provide an effective means of overcoming network latency, and perhaps most importantly, through their ability to operate asynchronously and autonomously of the process that created them, helps you to construct more robust and fault-tolerant. Read on and let us introduce you to software agents - the mobile as well as the stationary ones. We will explain all the benefits of mobile agents and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems before concluding this paper with a brief overview of some contemporary mobile agent systems.

Pervasive computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. Computational power will be available everywhere. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help users in accomplishing their tasks. However, for this vision to become a reality, developers must build applications that constantly adapt to a highly dynamic computing environment. To make the developers' task feasible, we introduce a system architecture for pervasive computing, called one.world . Our architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. It includes a set of services, such as service discovery, checkpointing, migration, and replication, that help to structure applications and directly simplify the task of coping with constant change. We describe the design and implementation of our architecture and present the results of an evaluation, which includes two case studies.