A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

Using mobility and exception handling to achieve mobile agents that survive server crash failures

Mobile agent technology, when designed and used effectively, can minimize bandwidth consumption and autonomously provide a snapshot of the current context of a distributed system. Protecting mobile agents from server crashes is a challenging issue, since developers normally have no control over remote servers. Server crash failures can leave replicas, instable storage, unavailable for an unknown time period. Furthermore, few systems have considered the need for using a fault tolerant protocol among a group of collaborating mobile agents. This thesis uses exception handling to protect mobile agents from server crash failures. An exception model is proposed for mobile agents and two exception handler designs are investigated. The first exists at the server that created the mobile agent and uses a timeout mechanism. The second, the mobile shadow scheme, migrates with the mobile agent and operates at the previous server visited by the mobile agent. A case study application has been developed to compare the performance of the two exception handler designs. Performance results demonstrate that although the second design is slower it offers the smaller trip time when handling a server crash. Furthermore, no modification of the server environment is necessary. This thesis shows that the mobile shadow exception handling scheme reduces complexity for a group of mobile agents to survive server crashes. The scheme deploys a replica that monitors the server occupied by the master, at each stage of the itinerary. The replica exists at the previous server visited in the itinerary. Consequently, each group member is a single fault tolerant entity with respect to server crash failures. Other schemes introduce greater complexity and performance overheads since, for each stage of the itinerary, a group of replicas is sent to servers that offer an equivalent service. In addition, future research is established for fault tolerance in groups of collaborating mobile agents

A Java Simulation-Based Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agent Platforms.

Mobile agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for the design and implementations of distributed applications .Manyof these Mobile Agent platforms have been developed, new one, and new versions of old agents, kept on appearing everyyear, so choosing the right or most suitable platform for a particular application area; based on their performance is achallenge for both the developers and the users. This paper carried out a qualitative comparison across three selected, Javabased Mobile Agent System, Aglet Tracy, and JADE. Two of them (Aglets and JADE) were selected for quantitativeevaluation on their time of transfer/retrieval of compressed data files. In our implementation, Aglet version 2.02 and JADE3.4.1 were used. A java simulation program was developed and used in measuring the performance of the two mobileagents, using transmission time and compressed time as performance metrics. In this paper work, a unique portnumber(2080) was chosen for the loading of classes and mobility of agents. Ten dummy data files (also refer to as Load orMessage) were created with sizes ranges from 100Kb to 1 Mb. A gzip compression tool was used to compress each of thesefiles and sent through the Aglet and JADE enabled network. The transmission time (in milliseconds) for each correspondingfiles size (in Bytes) in the two Mobile agents were recorded. We deduced from our qualitative results that, Tracy plug-infeatures give users room for reusability and extension. Aglets provide weak security and poorly scalable. JADE has astrong security, scalable and its multi agent feature will enrich its usage on the internet. Our quantitative results show thattransferring/retrieving of compressed data file is faster in JADE than in Aglets. The integrity of the files are also kept safe, inboth mobile agents, that is after decompressions they can still be reused.Keywords: Aglet, Gzip, JADE, Compression ratio, Mobile Agent Networ

An Optimizing Java Translation Framework for Automated Checkpointing and Strong Mobility

Long-running programs, e.g., in high-performance computing, need to write periodic checkpoints of their execution state to disk to allow them to recover from node failure. Manually adding checkpointing code to an application, however, is very tedious. The mechanisms needed for writing the execution state of a program to disk and restoring it are similar to those needed for migrating a running thread or a mobile object. We have extended a source-to-source translation scheme that allows the migration of mobile Java objects with running threads to make it more general and allow it to be used for automated checkpointing. Our translation scheme allows serializable threads to be written to disk or migrated with a mobile agent to a remote machine. The translator generates code that maintains a serializable run-time stack for each thread as a Java data structure. While this results in significant run-time overhead, it allows the checkpointing code to be generated automatically. We improved the locking mechanism that is needed to protect the run-time stack as well as the translation scheme. Our experimental results demonstrate an speedup of the generated code over the original translator and show that the approach is feasible in practice

An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

Information Retrieval Using Mobile Agent (Aglet)

This project will present 3 objective in HPS (Hand Phone System) that help user to search for hand phone detail information by: [1] Brand such as Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. [2] Version of the hand phone (model). [3] Price: User can input the price range. Instead of having to surf endlessly through the WWW (World Wide Web) and digesting huge amounts of possibly untrustworthy information, personalized mobile agents autonomously gather information about the item user want to see. Once they have found ihe destination or server (the piece ofsoftware): the agent can send the result back to the user. This project will be focusing on Information Retrieval and will be using mobile agent platform which is aglets, Java runtime, Jdkl.0.5_08, and Microsoft VisualJ++ 6.0 to design the GUI that build using Applet. This project will undergo 5stages which are; plan the hardware or software required for the project, then analyze and get the Product Requirement, next is design the process of implementing HPS System, implement the project by using mobile agent platform - aglets that involves programming activity and last is to test the product to ensure the product successfully completed and testify and fulfill the objectives of this project. The result and discussion about the system produced will highlights how the system works generally. Some other interested formula and idea from other project's discussion will also be used to further doing this project. As a conclusion, is project is aimed to create a simple HPS system using mobile agent technology and need to be improved in many aspects and that can be the recommendation for future work for expansion and continuation

Behavioral pattern analysis of secure migration and communications in eCommerce using cryptographic protocols on a mobile MAS platform

Mobile Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) systems can be used with real success in a growing number of eCommerce applications nowadays. Security has been identified as numerous times by different researchers as a top criterion for the acceptance of mobile agent adoption. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of behavior patterns of a mobile MAS platform when using different cryptographic protocols to assure communication and migration integrity and confidentiality. Different use case sceneries of eCommerce applications as well as many other aspects have been studied, such as overhead, different communication patterns, different loads and bandwidth issues. This work is also extensible to other mobile and non-mobile MAS platforms. The results obtained can be used and should be taken into account by designers and implementers of secure mobile and also non-mobile agent platforms and agents.European Union TeleCARE IST-2000-2760