Some analysis on mobile-agent based network routing

©2004 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Deployment of mobile agents in network-based applications has attracted lots of attentions in recent years. How to control the activities of agents is crucial for effective application of mobile agents. This paper focuses on the application of mobile agents in network routing. Two important activity properties of mobile agents are identified: the probability of success (the probability of finding the destination) and the distribution of mobile agents running in the network. To our knowledge, little work has been done on these two aspects. Our results show that the number of mobile agents can be controlled by adjusting the number of agents generated per request and the number of jumps each mobile agent can move. Thus, we can improve network performance by tuning relevant parameters.Wenyu Qu, Hong She

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