Remote Data Retrieval for Bioinformatics Applications: An Agent Migration Approach

Some of the approaches have been developed to retrieve data automatically from one or multiple remote biological data sources. However, most of them require researchers to remain online and wait for returned results. The latter not only requires highly available network connection, but also may cause the network overload. Moreover, so far none of the existing approaches has been designed to address the following problems when retrieving the remote data in a mobile network environment: (1) the resources of mobile devices are limited; (2) network connection is relatively of low quality; and (3) mobile users are not always online. To address the aforementioned problems, we integrate an agent migration approach with a multi-agent system to overcome the high latency or limited bandwidth problem by moving their computations to the required resources or services. More importantly, the approach is fit for the mobile computing environments. Presented in this paper are also the system architecture, the migration strategy, as well as the security authentication of agent migration. As a demonstration, the remote data retrieval from GenBank was used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Cost-Effective Location Management for Mobile Agents on the Internet

Many mobile agent system-related services and applications require interacting with a mobile agent by passing messages. However, an agent’s mobility raises several challenges in delivering messages to a mobile agent accurately. Consisting of tracking and message delivery phases, most mobile agent location management schemes create or receive many update messages and interaction messages to ensure the effectiveness of the schemes. In addition to downgrading the overall performance of a mobile agent location management scheme, excessive transmission of messages increases the network load. The migration locality of a mobile agent and the interaction rate between mobile agents significantly affect the performance of a mobile agent location management scheme with respect to location management cost. This work presents a novel Dual Home based Scheme (DHS) that can lower the location management costs in terms of migration locality and interaction rate. While the DHS scheme uniquely adopts dual home location management architecture, a selective update strategy based on that architecture is also designed for cost-effective location management of mobile agents. Moreover, DHS is compared with available schemes based on formulations and simulation experiments from the perspective of location management costs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DHS scheme performs satisfactorily in terms of migration locality and interaction rate